How Do We Lose Really High Frequency Hearing, 8-20 kHz?

Is it by noise or purely by aging?

I know the medical literature says that noise-induced hearing loss is usually a big dip at 4khz, but can dip occur at 8-20khz? Can noise completely kill off really high frequency, or is it generally by age?

 

Take a combo of ototoxic drugs and you can loose it all very quickly, it happened to me. I still hear fine, or close to fine up to 8khz, after that, all gone bad.

 

Once you get older you will lose more and more of your high freq hearing. Se chart below. However it is no uncommon that young people being in a band with out protection our just listing for loud musk a lot, lose almost all their hearing above 6000 Hz already in their forties.

Here is what i believe. Some of us get a sudden damage above 8000 Hz. Some hair cells dies right off. Some just get broken and react to lower freq than the should (reactive T, distortion). Some just get twisted around and fire of spontaneously. I think that we would be far better off if all of that cells dies off. That is also hopefully what happens over the years. Some might just recover. That might take many many years but hopefully we then we will be free from the cochlear part of out T. Then we just have to struggle with whats lift in out brain witch i think is easier to live with.

Some of my friends have severe high freq hearing lost after being in a band for many years, they just describes their T as a high pitched tone. They can hear it in most environments but no reactivenes, no unpredictable patterns or eclectic zaps all over the place. Sound like a dream to me if a could achieve that over the years...

@Telis, any thoughts on this?

 

I've always had very good hearing. I went to an indoor concert. My allocated seat was up front near a speaker which was facing my left ear. I don’t normally go to concerts and wasn't prepared with any ear protection, and didn’t know you could get damage from just one event. Totally innocent – I thought musicians had to have years of loud music to get damage. I have noticed a big drop in my hearing in my left ear and now have T in left ear. Graph below for your interest. See the biggest drop at 8,000 - and probably beyond. I don’t have a before and after graph to prove it but I know this one event caused the damage.

 

Listing to loud music often gives a dip at 4000 Hz, clubs concerts. As i understand it high freq lost is more to meds, infections or or sudden loud explosions like gunshots, alarms ect. Could also be natural aging and not proper done wax removal.

 

So, is your t then somewhere around 8,000? My left ear gets pretty much the same graph

 

oh so what you're saying is noise doesn't really cause damage in the 8-20khz , you lose them from 20khz and downward gradually by age or ototoxic medicine ? usually damage by noise is only seen at 4khz? right?

 

Interesting, I guess that is a pretty good average. I was 39 at T onset and could easily hear up to 17-18khz, maybe this is rare. I was in the audio industry for years, I knew what my ears were capable of prior to T, I lost a lot of range very quickly. Maybe it is possible that the more you loose in one shot, the more that your brain tries to over compensate for the dead or damaged spots. I always thought this was the reason some people could go slowly deaf and not get tinnitus. I don't know of anyone that has not developed tinnitus with any noticeable amount of sudden hearing loss and trauma.

 

I wondered about that because it sounds so high pitched. Today I used one of those on-line tone generators with some good headphones until I thought it matched and I reckon the T pitch is just over the 11,000 mark.

I should also mention the speaker I was near at the concert particularly had the high impact sounds of the drums coming through it.

 

That's interesting, because my t is also above 11,000, namely 14,700... Since we don`t know if we have hearing loss somewhere above 10,000 (there are no audiograms going up to 16,000 as far as I know) it's difficult to say, what caused the t, maybe the drop around 8,000, or maybe a hearing loss in the higher frequencies...

 

Yes there is no way to know for sure, but my feeling is that it’s the loss of higher frequencies causing my T.

I’ve actually just bought a hearing aid today to see if it helps soften the T by giving more auditory stimulation and bringing up the other frequencies I’ve lost so its more like my right ear. Despite the fact I'm still considered within 'normal hearing' range I felt a bit disorientated with the unequal hearing now the left one hears less – not to mention the T as well. I guess because I lost the hearing so suddenly.

I just read your background story. So sorry to hear you have it so young and being a musician as well.

 

Thank you Tamika, sad thing is here are a lot of people on the board who are even younger. Maybe there is a cure (or something close to a cure) before they turn my age, who knows, let's hope!