Congenital Hearing Loss - What it Means to You
Congenital hearing loss is one of four or five types of hearing loss that people can experience in their lives.
The term congenital points to genetics as the reason for the hearing loss.
This means that anyone with this type of hearing loss inherited it and cannot do anything to help themselves.
What happens is that there is a recessive gene or a dominant gene that impacts various generations of families and causes hearing loss that can happen at birth and last for the entire life.
If the dominant gene is responsible for this loss, there will be one person affected for each generation.
However, with the recessive gene causing the problems, the defect can skip generations in many cases.
Congenital hearing loss is not something that is fixable.
It can be treated with the use of hearing aids, but until technology figures out the situation more, people are simply left to be without the ability to hear unless they have hearing aids.
For many, hearing aids can prove to be only a slight benefit.
These people likely have a harder time learning language, since much of the learning is done through auditory perception and mimicking in early childhood.
While hearing aids can help, it is not very likely that a child born deaf will ever speak clearly like a child who can hear.
They may improve on their speech abilities with the use of hearing aids to amplify the sounds around them, but in most cases, some speech impairment is still noticed.
If you or a child of yours suffers from congenital hearing loss, hearing aids might not be a large concern.
While they may or may not be helpful, many people simply choose to raise their children without them, or simply assume that the child can get by with sign language and lip-reading at best.
In some cases, hearing aids might not even offer any help, leaving the affected person deaf and unable to fix the situation by any means.
There are many different defects that qualify under the category of congenital hearing loss, such as Waardenburg Syndrome, Stickler Syndrome, Connexin 26 deafness, Usher Syndrome, and Pendred Syndrome.
Having your child tested at a very young age and throughout their life can help to guarantee the proper diagnosis and get the help that you need .
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The term congenital points to genetics as the reason for the hearing loss.
This means that anyone with this type of hearing loss inherited it and cannot do anything to help themselves.
What happens is that there is a recessive gene or a dominant gene that impacts various generations of families and causes hearing loss that can happen at birth and last for the entire life.
If the dominant gene is responsible for this loss, there will be one person affected for each generation.
However, with the recessive gene causing the problems, the defect can skip generations in many cases.
Congenital hearing loss is not something that is fixable.
It can be treated with the use of hearing aids, but until technology figures out the situation more, people are simply left to be without the ability to hear unless they have hearing aids.
For many, hearing aids can prove to be only a slight benefit.
These people likely have a harder time learning language, since much of the learning is done through auditory perception and mimicking in early childhood.
While hearing aids can help, it is not very likely that a child born deaf will ever speak clearly like a child who can hear.
They may improve on their speech abilities with the use of hearing aids to amplify the sounds around them, but in most cases, some speech impairment is still noticed.
If you or a child of yours suffers from congenital hearing loss, hearing aids might not be a large concern.
While they may or may not be helpful, many people simply choose to raise their children without them, or simply assume that the child can get by with sign language and lip-reading at best.
In some cases, hearing aids might not even offer any help, leaving the affected person deaf and unable to fix the situation by any means.
There are many different defects that qualify under the category of congenital hearing loss, such as Waardenburg Syndrome, Stickler Syndrome, Connexin 26 deafness, Usher Syndrome, and Pendred Syndrome.
Having your child tested at a very young age and throughout their life can help to guarantee the proper diagnosis and get the help that you need .
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