Diabetes is a challenging disease. Today, 37 million Americans have diabetes, a condition that can cause significant nerve damage to your hands, feet, eyes, and kidneys. Diabetes can also harm your hearing by damaging the blood vessels and nerves of the inner ear, nerves that transmit sound to your brain.
The highest risk of hearing loss from diabetes is for people 40-60 years of age. Some diabetes medications can damage your hearing too. Be sure you ask your audiologist or pharmacist about the side effects of your prescriptions.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hearing loss is twice as common in people with diabetes than people of the same age without the disease. People with prediabetes are threatened, too, with a 30% higher rate of hearing loss than people with normal blood sugar levels. Prediabetes is having blood-sugar levels higher than normal but not high enough to have type 2 diabetes.
Protect your hearing the right way
If you have diabetes, our team of audiologists recommend you adopt the following six-step plan for preserving your hearing:
- Manage your blood sugar levels effectively.
- Know the signs of hearing loss and monitor them (see typical symptoms of hearing loss in the next section).
- Schedule annual hearing screenings. The CDC recommends you have your hearing tested by an audiologist when first diagnosed with diabetes, followed by yearly screenings. You may be unaware that you have lost hearing, but you can test for it. Like high blood sugar and high blood pressure, you may not notice any changes, but you can test for them.
- Share your hearing-screening results with your primary care team.
- Protect your hearing. Wear hearing protection when needed (download "Hearing Damage Scale"). Ask your audiologist for help selecting hearing protection and using it effectively.
- Treat any hearing loss you already have as soon as possible. Hearing loss makes permanent changes to brain structures. You want to limit the scope and size of these changes.
Six ways to tell if you've lost hearing
For most people, losing hearing is gradual process, something you don’t notice. You can still hear with a loss of hearing, but the loss is real and it’s damaging to your brain. Here are six signs of hearing loss you can monitor:
- Asking people to repeat themselves
- Claiming that others are mumbling
- Having difficulty following group conversations
- Straining to hear in noisy places, such as restaurants
- Struggling to hear children or quiet voices
- Turning up the volume of the TV and radio so that it's too loud for others
Hearing loss caused by diabetes (sensorineural) is permanent, but audiologists can treat this type of hearing loss with hearing aids.
The many risks of hearing loss
The damage hearing loss creates reaches well beyond difficulty communicating with your family and friends. It can harm your psychological and physical health. For example, untreated hearing loss can lead to feelings of depression and anxiety, and it can trigger dementia. Consider the following evidence:
- Researchers at Johns Hopkins confirm that mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss doubles, triples, and quadruples the risk of dementia.
- The University of Oxford found that poor speech-in-noise hearing was associated with a 91% increased risk of developing dementia.
Call to schedule your annual hearing screening
All adults can safeguard their hearing with annual hearing screenings. But if you have diabetes, your risk of hearing loss is much higher, so be sure annual screenings are part of your complete plan for managing diabetes. At Sertoma Speech & Hearing Centers, hearing screenings are free, take only 15 minutes, and are performed by audiologists.
Crest Hill: 630-633-5060 | Palos Hills: 708-599-9500
