As we get older, many struggle with the issue of losing our hearing, leaving us feeling frustrated, confused and handicapped. You can better cope with this issue if you understand why it happens and how to make it easier. Presbycusis is defined as age-related loss of hearing and is caused by growing older as well as a handful of other reasons. Some of these reasons are ones that we can change and others are causes that cannot be controlled.

One of the influential factors in the onset of age-induced hearing loss is widely thought to be heredity. As with many conditions, if your parents and/or grandparents suffered from this condition you run a far higher risk of losing hearing capacity at some point.

Naturally, people whose line of employment has them in noisy environs and frequently being in the presence of loud noises increases the chances of losing hearing. You can even attribute the issue of hearing loss to spending too much time listening to loud music through headphones.

Interestingly, there are several other factors like age, gender, and race that may affect your chances. You will rarely find a person under the age of fifty that gets diagnosed with hearing loss that is age related, though there is no set age where it begins. Our risk gets bigger and bigger as we age and you will find that once a person reaches 65 years old, half of the people in their age group are experiencing this type of loss.

Women are less likely to experience hearing issues that are blamed on age when compared to men. Sixty percent of the people that deal with loss of hearing that is age related are men and that percentage grows as age increases, according to the National Academy of Aging Society.

Race may also provide a crucial link as whites have a higher risk than do similarly aged blacks and the gap only increases with age. Whites have 91% of the hearing impairment issues in the United States, but only make up 83% of the population as a whole according the NAAS.

What brings about the hearing loss are minute and subtle alterations that occur over time in the mechanics of the inner ear. We are able to hear sounds that are high-pitched because of the portion of the ear that is called the cochlea, which often changes with age. The cochlea functions by having the minuscule hairs within it gather vibrations and transforming them into nerve impulses that our brains can understand. These hairs are lost over the course of time and the nerve endings may deaden as a part of aging. We lose hearing because of this as these hairs do not grow back.

Loss of flexibility in the cochlea and harm done to the acoustic nerve are a few more examples of changes that may occur in the ear that can lead to presbycusis.

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