Hearing Problems Due To Genetic Reasons

Hearing loss problems can occur at any time in the life of a person. The most common type of hearing loss occurs due to old age. When a person keeps growing older, the small hair-like cells in their cochlea that help them to listen properly, keep getting damaged with time. As a result, hearing loss problems to some degree is a very common thing among older people. However, this doesn’t mean everyone will have hearing problems during old age, also it doesn’t mean that only old people will go through hearing loss problems.

One might suffer from hearing loss problems for many different reasons. Different conditions, accidents, trauma, loud noises, diseases, etc. can easily cause hearing loss problems. Also, you’ll see that there are some newborn children who have hearing loss problems as a birth defect. But you’ll be surprised to know that hearing loss problems can also be genetic. Your gene might betray you and make you suffer from hearing loss problems, and you might start to feel this problem at any point in your life. The problem might start right after your birth, or it might remain dormant until you reach a certain age.

Genetic Connection With Hearing Loss

You can always find some people who got hearing loss problems at such a young age, and it didn’t happen due to any accidents or other occurrences such as loud noise, disease, etc. They just inherited the hearing loss problems when they were born, it was a dormant feature of their genes.

Not necessarily their parents have the same hearing loss problems, it can come from anyone from the bloodline, from a long line of predecessors. And since any certain disease can remain dormant in genes for generations, you’ll see that most of their family members have a completely healthy hearing ability. Gene mutations can also cause these hearing loss problems. There are some hereditary conditions such as otosclerosis, Pendred Syndrome, Usher’s Syndrome, etc that can cause hearing loss problems in a person.

Otosclerosis

This disorder takes place if the ear is unable to amplify the sound it hears. There are three bones in our ears that are connected to the eardrums that help to amplify the sound waves. But if one of the three bones fails to vibrate freely and amplify the sound as a consequence, then this condition gets developed in a person. 

Pendred Syndrome

This disorder is connected with both hearing loss and a thyroid condition that is called goiter. If the thyroid gland faces enlargement in any part of it, then that’s goiter. This condition might also cause hearing loss among people. Hearing loss from birth, enlargement in the thyroid gland, changes in the inner ear, enlarged vestibular aqueduct, etc. are some symptoms of this condition. This condition is basically caused due to gene mutation, and one might inherit it from generation to generation.

Usher’s Syndrome

This condition is a rare one, and if someone suffers from this condition, they face hearing loss problems due to the loss of the ability of the inner ear and auditory nerves to transmit the sound signals to the brain. This condition can also damage a person’s retina in the eyes, and as a result, one might lose their vision too.

Gene Mutation and Hearing Loss

There are at least 30,000 genes per cell in the human body, and there are trillions of cells in a body. So, you know that you can’t really count how many genes are there in a human body. Genes are basically made of chromosomes, and chromosomes help make up the DNA and hold the hereditary information of a person. So, if any person faces gene mutation or any kind of changes in their DNA, their descendants will also inherit the changed DNA. 

These gene mutations aren’t always bad and might not be connected to hearing loss. But there are some forms of gene mutations that can deform your inner ear or something else that is connected to your auditory system. If your auditory nerves or some other part of your auditory systems get deformed or damaged due to gene mutations then it will cause hearing loss problems. And you might inherit these problems genetically from your parents when you were born. It might even happen that none of your other siblings or other blood relatives got it, but still they’ll have it dormant in their genes, which might get revealed in the people of their future generations.

Final Words

If anyone falls victim to genetically induced hearing loss problems, it is just sheer bad luck, and there was nothing that they could’ve done about it. However, if you face these problems you can still take care of your hearing health and increase your hearing ability drastically by going through different measures. Especially, digital hearing aids can be a great solution for people who are suffering from hearing loss problems of any kind. Hearing aids not only just amplify the sounds, but they also provide many other features that help a person with hearing loss to hear things very well, and almost close to normal hearing. So, make sure that you are taking proper measures to increase your hearing ability and living a perfectly full life.