Deafness Research UK tackles 'dead' hearing regions

7 June 2004

New research just announced by Britain's research charity for deaf people, Deafness Research UK, should result in more effective hearing aids and a better quality of life for the hard of hearing.

Funded by the Freemason's Grand Charity to the tune of almost £50,000, the three-year project aims to improve the fitting of hearing aids by developing more accurate ways of measuring hearing loss at different frequencies.

Gradual deterioration of hearing means that, for most people, hearing impairment is an unwelcome feature of later life. Half of all people over the age of 60 are affected - making it the most common disability among older people.

Hearing loss makes it difficult to participate in conversations. It can cause embarrassment and frustration and many affected people withdraw from social situations, leaving them feeling lonely and socially isolated.

Because hearing does not generally deteriorate evenly across all frequencies - older people often have reduced ability to hear higher frequency sounds while retaining the ability to hear lower frequency sounds, for example - a hearing aid should provide more amplification in the frequencies where they are needed.

However, in some people, damage to the sensory hair cells of the inner ear is so extensive that sounds at affected frequencies either cannot be heard even when highly amplified or are heard with distorted pitch and tone quality. People affected in this way are said to have "dead" hearing regions; the main difficulty they experience is in understanding speech, because it encompasses both high and low frequencies.

Currently, precise diagnosis of dead regions is difficult and, however carefully they may be fitted, many people find that hearing aids are of limited help.

This project aims to devise a set of signals which it is hoped can be incorporated into standard testing procedures to enable accurate diagnosis of patterns of hearing loss and identification of dead regions.

An estimated 270,000 people in the UK alone stand to benefit from this research, which is being carried out at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, under the leadership of Deafness Research UK' adviser on hearing aids, Professor Brian Moore.

"This research will give us access to more accurate information about individual patterns of hearing loss at different frequencies, and about the extent of dead regions, in turn enabling better fitting of hearing aids," says Professor Moore. "For example, if two people have the same audiogram, but one has dead regions, that person's aids will need to be programmed differently.

"At the same time, we are developing novel amplification strategies for hearing aids which we hope will help people with dead regions of hearing. We are looking at various methods of providing extra information about speech for people with dead regions. One way of doing this is by 'transposition', where some of the higher frequencies in speech are converted to lower frequencies, which can be better heard and analysed.

"We hope that the combination of more accurate testing with new generation hearing aids should improve speech comprehension for people with dead regions of hearing. This research will also help in the assessment of need for cochlear implants."

A personal story

A hearing impairment exacerbated by dead regions threatens to end Northamptonshire Judge Peter Morrell's career.

Judge Morrell, 60, who is a participant in the dead regions research, suffered permanent damage to his hearing in 1962 after an exercise firing guns at a school Combined Cadet Force exercise in Surrey. Since the 24-hour exercise, during which he fired numerous guns, including two-inch mortars, he has suffered a significant loss of hearing in the range 3.5-4.5 kHz.

As Judge Morrell has aged, audiograms have shown that this significant loss has worsened into a dead region.

"While I always coped at work with having a hearing loss, for example by repeating what a witness has said and then asking the witness to confirm that my record is correct, having a dead region is having a dramatic effect on my life," he says.

"Professionally, it has become difficult for me to record accurately what a witness is saying where the witness is either a woman, or a softly spoken man. Constant repetition of a witness' evidence increases the strain on the witness and can compromise the fairness of the proceedings. The situation is so bad that the Lord Chancellor has informed me that, unless the situation can be improved, I shall be forced to take early retirement on the grounds of ill health.

"Socially too, I face considerable problems. Patient though my wife of 34 years is, she finds it very irritating that I cannot hear what she is saying to me, especially if we are in the car, or if she does not face me when she speaks, or when we are at a social gathering," he says.

"Any kind of social repartee is impossible. Either I dominate the conversation, or I lapse into silence and take no part in the discourse. Repartee, which I used to enjoy, is now impossible. Theatres are a waste of time, and cinemas are only worthwhile if the film is in a foreign language and sub-titled.

"If this research is successful, it could help extend my professional usefulness to normal retirement age and bring about a welcome improvement in my personal relationships and to my social life. I hope it will yield significant improvements for people suffering as I am."

For more information, please contact:

Brian Moore, phone 01223 333 574, email bcjm@cus.cam.ac.uk

Judge Peter Morrell, phone 07860 573 597, email pmorrell@lix.compulink.co.uk

Editors' notes

Deafness Research UK (The Hearing Research Trust) is the UK's medical research charity for deaf and hard of hearing people. Since being founded in 1985, Deafness Research UK has secured radical improvements in the prevention, diagnosis and the treatment of hearing difficulties.

The Freemasons' Grand Charity is the central grant-making charity of all Freemasons in England and Wales and in 2003/2004 it made grants to non-masonic charities in excess of £3.2 million. Charitable giving has always been at the heart of Freemasonry and all funding for The Grand Charity comes from donations by individual Freemasons and their families.

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