Why Hearing Today May Be Gone Tomorrow 今日听力尚好.docVIP

Why Hearing Today May Be Gone Tomorrow 今日听力尚好，明日何故耳聋 By Andrew Derrington The human ear is an incredible piece of engineering and exquisitely sensitive. Calculations show that the quietest sound we can hear vibrates the eardrum by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. [2] Before those vibrations are analysed by the brain they pass through several stages of mechanical and neural processing that select the sounds we want to hear, adjust their level for comfort and intelligibility, and turn down the volume of distracting sounds. [3] But for 8.5m people in the UK something goes wrong with one of the stages. Different parts of the processing chain are vulnerable at different ages. Some of the causes are avoidable and many are treatable. Treatments for problems that occur early in the processing chain are more straightforward and more effective. [4] The easiest problem to treat is the one that occurs earliest in the chain. Obstruction of the ear canal by wax causes a relatively mild hearing loss. The loss is negligible unless the canal is completely blocked, which is rare, and is easily restored by cleaning out the wax. [5] Things get more complicated behind the eardrum, in the airfilled middle-ear cavity. [6] Middle-ear problems are common, treatable and the subject of intense debate about who should be treated and how. Anything that impairs transmission across the middle ear--even if it is only the pressure changes in an aircraft cabin, or blockage of the eustachian tube by a cold--causes hearing loss. [7] At the centre of the debate over treatment is the common childhood condition known in the medical profession as otitis media with effusion or OME. [8] This is usually caused by an infection of the middle ear, often in the after-math of a cold, in which the middle ear cavity fills up with a liquid effusion. The effusion can be thick and sticky, giving the condition its colloquial name of glue ear. The liquid causes variable degrees of hearing loss by impairing t