Over 90 Percent of Diabetic Patients Have This Symptom

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Many people with diabetes have experienced sensorineural hearing loss, but what is the relationship between diabetes and hearing loss?

According to the American Diabetes Association, there are about 37 million people with diabetes in America, and up to about 34.5 million cases have some type of hearing loss. That accounts for 93 percent of all the diabetic patients.

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that hearing loss is twice as common in people who have diabetes as it is in people of the same age who don’t.

Even people with prediabetes (having blood glucose higher than normal but not enough to develop type 2 diabetes) have a 30 percent higher risk of hearing loss than people with normal blood glucose.

Hearing loss happens for many reasons, such as aging or hearing loud noises too much, but having diabetes can put you at risk for hearing loss, according to the CDC.

In a study about the effect of diabetes on sensorineural hearing loss, published in the journal Ontology and Neurotology in 2003, researchers reviewed electronic medical records from 53,461 nondiabetic age-matched patients and 12,575 diabetic patients, from 1989 to 2003.

The study shows that some main outcome measures were used to identify whether patients with diabetes have a higher incidence of hearing loss than the general population, and to examine whether control of diabetes is related to severity of hearing loss. Serum creatinine was one of those outcome measures.

Serum creatinine is a measure to test creatinine levels, a waste product in blood, and to examine how well kidneys are filtering the waste from blood. People having diabetes can also have kidney problems, and this will result in serum creatinine.

The results of the above study reflected the correlation between hearing loss and diabetes in serum creatinine. Researchers found that hearing loss was more common in people with diabetes than in those who don’t have the condition, and poor control of diabetes correlated with hearing loss in patients.

Researchers concluded that the severity of hearing loss seemed to correlate with the progression of disease as reflected in serum creatinine. And it may be because of microangiopathic disease in the inner ear.

It’s still not clear how diabetes relates to hearing loss. However, the CDC notes that diabetes can lead to nerve damage that affects many parts of the body, including hands, feet, eyes, and kidneys, thereby also likely causing nerve damage in patients’ ears. Having high blood sugar can damage small blood vessels and nerves in the inner ear over time.

Diabetic patients could experience both high blood sugar and low blood sugar. People with low blood sugar may also experience hearing loss because having low blood sugar over time can damage how the nerve signals travel from the inner ear to the brain.

Signs of hearing loss include asking others to repeat themselves more often, getting lost in conversations with more than one person, thinking that others are mumbling, struggling with quiet voices, turning up the TV or radio too loud, or having problems with hearing in some noisy places such as busy restaurants.

People who experience the above problems should talk to a doctor to protect their ears. A hearing test may be performed by an audiologist (a health care professional who evaluates hearing problems), if necessary.