Hidden Hearing Loss
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can Hidden Hearing Loss be Identified in Clinical Conditions?
IRAS ID
220925
Contact name
Richard Windle
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 4 months, 29 days
Research summary
Hidden Hearing Loss (HHL) results from both ageing and exposure to noise at relatively low levels. It is caused by a “disconnection” of auditory nerves from the sound detecting cells of the inner ear and only occurs to the nerves carrying information for high sound levels, not the nerves carrying information for lower sound levels. Consequently, people with HHL will still perform normally in standard hearing tests because these measure our ability to hear quiet sounds, hence the term “hidden”. Nevertheless nerve damage reduces the detail and accuracy of auditory information sent to the brain, causing individuals to struggle to understand speech, especially in noisy environments.
Research has shown that an individual’s noise exposure can be related to the strength of the signal entering the auditory nerve from the ear, measured with a common technique called the Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) which uses electrodes placed on the scalp. In one project, individuals with HHL tended to perform better than the normal population when trying to detect speech in a noisy environment at very quiet levels – but performed much worse at louder levels. This raised the potential of using a simple clinical speech-in-noise test to detect HHL rather than a more complicated and time-consuming test such as ABR. It also suggested that using hearing aids to make sounds louder might be actively detrimental to people with HHL.
Previous research has been conducted in research labs, only using subjects with normal hearing. This project will repeat the methodology of a previous project using clinical instrumentation to test a clinical population, some of whom have a hearing loss. The intention is to see whether HHL can be identified in the hearing impaired and, if so, whether a simpler clinical tool can be used to identify it.
REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/SC/0092
Date of REC Opinion
10 May 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion