Hearing Loss Types: Sensorineural, Conductive, Central and Mixed

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Older Americans are the third most prevalent sufferers of chronic hearing loss, and it is believed that 25% to 40% of people aged 60 and above suffer from hearing loss. To be exact, there are three types of hearing loss that are most often encountered in clinical practice, and these are sensorineural, conductive as well as central hearing loss.

There may also be a mixed or fourth type of hearing loss that is a combination of conductive and sensorineural hearing loss. Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common type of hearing loss and accounts for approximately 90% of all hearing loss.

The term “sensorineural” denotes either a cochlear or lesion of the eight nerve. Doctors are able to diagnose sensorineural hearing loss with the help of audiometry, which shows considerable hearing loss unaccompanied by the “air-borne gap” that is a characteristic of conductive hearing loss. This implies that air conduction is equal to bone conduction.

There Are Other Types of Hearing Loss

On the other hand, conductive hearing loss is a type of hearing loss that is next in importance when it comes to hearing loss, and is second most common after sensorineural hearing loss.

In this type of hearing loss, sound is not transmitted into inner ear and diagnosis of this condition is usually made through observations of an “air-borne gap” on audiometry, which means that hearing is far better when sound is transmitted while bypassing the middle ear ossicular chain. In addition, the air-borne gap should be a minimum of ten decibels in strength.

The third type of hearing loss or central deafness is a very rare type that is not encountered often when compared with conductive and sensorineural hearing loss. However, according to recent studies on this type of hearing loss, it is revealed that central components are becoming more noticeable than was previously anticipated, and patients generally have poor scores on speech reception threshold or word recognition scores.

Patients with this type of hearing loss usually will experience inconsistent auditory behavior and it may even result in their being wrongly diagnosed as having functional or psychogenic hearing disturbances.

The last type of hearing loss is mixed hearing loss in which it may happen that a conductive hearing loss occurs in combination with a sensorineural hearing loss, and it may be because of damage to the outer or middle ear as well as in the inner ear or auditory nerve.

The treatment of each different type of hearing loss is dependent on the causes and severity of the condition and some hearing losses may be treated through medical treatment while others may require hearing aids as in the case of permanent hearing loss.