Audiograms and diagnosing types of hearing loss

Audiograms and diagnosing types of hearing loss

Ideally the audiogram would show a straight line, but in practice everyone is slightly different, and small variations are considered normal. Larger variations, especially below the norm, may indicate hearing impairment which occurs to some extent with increasing age, but may be exacerbated by prolonged exposure to fairly high noise levels such as by living close to an airport or busy road, work related exposure to high noise, or brief exposure to very high sound levels such as gunshot or music in either a loud band or clubs and pubs. Hearing impairment may also be the result of certain diseases such as otosclerosis or Ménière's disease and these can be diagnosed from the shape of the audiogram.
An audiogram showing typical slight hearing variation.

Otosclerosis results in an audiogram with significant loss at all frequencies, often of around 40dB [3].

Ménière's disease results in a severe loss at low frequencies [4].

Noise induced deafness or sensorineural loss results in loss at high frequencies, especially around 4 kHz and above, depending on the nature of the



_________________
cheapest iPad Apple
rapidshare link