Monitoring Your Hearing Health
July brings social interaction with family and friends in full swing. With beautiful, sunny weather outside, we can’t help to go for a walk with a friend, have dinner with a special someone and surround ourselves with people we love! To enjoy the summer fully, we must take care of our health and wellness and as well as our hearing.
Here is a brief overview of two well-known diseases linked to hearing with tips:
Cardiovascular Disease
You probably already know many of the reasons why cardiovascular health is important. What you might not know is just how important it is to your ability to hear well. The inner ear, where sound wave data is collected and sent to the brain, relies heavily on tiny blood vessels that feed the cells responsible for transmitting that information. Any problem in your cardiovascular system that restricts the flow of blood runs the risk of restricting that flow in the inner ear, essentially starving hearing-related cells and nerves of essential nutrients. Here’s a related tip: Nicotine is known to constrict blood vessels, making smoking bad for both your cardiovascular system and your ears.
Diabetes
It’s not an obvious connection to make, but diabetes and hearing loss often travel together. In fact, hearing loss is twice as common in people with diabetes compared to those without it. And remember those tiny blood vessels and nerves mentioned above? Research has indicated that high blood glucose levels associated with diabetes can damage them, leading to hearing impairment. A diagnosis of diabetes is something that should be closely followed by a comprehensive hearing exam, to be sure that no hearing-related damage has been done. That should be followed up by annual hearing tests to be sure the situation hasn’t changed.
Those are just two of the more well-known diseases with links to hearing loss; others include certain infectious diseases, such as measles and mumps. If you would like to have more in-depth information about the connections between hearing health and your overall health, please contact us at Great Waterway Hearing. We’ll be glad to help you.
The most important thing we would like you to take away from this blog article is a sense of just how interconnected everything about the human body is. While the ability to hear can almost seem like something outside ourselves at times, it is very much a function of the body. As such, it relies on the same bloodstream and oxygen the rest of the body relies on.
That interconnection is one more reason why annual hearing exams are so strongly recommended. An important part of any hearing exam that discovers hearing loss is the follow-up effort to establish the source of that loss. That search could lead to uncovering an underlying issue of which you were unaware.