[National Ear Care Day] Let’s pay attention to our “ear health” together!

March 3, 2021 is the 22nd National Ear Care Day. This year's theme is "Hearing Care for All Screen. Rehabilitate. Communicate."

The ear is one of the important physiological structures for us to contact the outside world. The human ear consists of three parts: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The outer ear and the middle ear have the functions of collecting, transmitting, and amplifying sound; the inner ear is responsible for sound perception, balance, and position sense.

1. Factors Affecting Ear Health

Our ears are so important, do you protect them well? In life, there are many bad habits that can cause ear damage, such as frequent ear cleaning, listening to music with headphones, and staying in noisy environments. These habits may cause varying degrees of hearing loss.

In addition to ear habits, diseases and drugs can also cause deafness. Diseases that can cause deafness include cerumen embolism, external auditory canal atresia, acute or chronic otitis media, tympanic membrane trauma, and inner ear, auditory nerve and nervous system diseases such as acoustic neuroma. Deafness-causing drugs include gentamicin, streptomycin, kanamycin, chloramphenicol, erythromycin and other aminoglycoside antibiotics.

2. How to prevent deafness

In order to reduce the incidence of deafness and the impact it has on life, early prevention and early intervention are particularly important.

1. Prevention of congenital hereditary deafness

Congenital deafness accounts for about 50% of deaf people in China, while hereditary deafness accounts for about 85% of congenital deafness, most of which are autosomal recessive. According to research, consanguineous marriage and marriage with congenital hereditary deaf people are the main factors for complicated hereditary deafness.

2. Prevent deafness during the fetal period

Hearing care should start during pregnancy. Mothers should avoid high-risk deafness factors during pregnancy, such as: generally do not receive preventive injections, do not receive radiation exposure to the abdomen, prevent maternal viral infection, and seek timely treatment if infected, and prohibit the use of ototoxic drugs when taking medication, etc. Protect the baby's hearing development during the fetal period.

3. Prevention of deafness in neonates

Newborn hearing screening can detect and diagnose interventions at an early stage, so it is particularly important to actively carry out newborn hearing screening. All newborns should undergo hearing screening using physiological testing methods before discharge. If the initial screening fails or is "suspicious", or even if the initial screening has been "passed" but the baby is at high risk of hearing loss, such as children in the intensive care unit, a hearing rescreening is required within 42 days of birth. If the "rescreening" fails, a hearing diagnosis must be performed within 3 months, and once confirmed, hearing intervention (such as wearing hearing aids, cochlear implants) and related rehabilitation work should be carried out as soon as possible.

4. Daily maintenance and prevention

At each stage, we should pay attention to the following maintenance points:

(1) Avoid noise: Being in a noisy environment for a long time can cause auditory fatigue and noise-induced hearing loss. In daily life, we should learn to relieve the pressure on our ears and relieve the pressure caused by strong sounds on the ears, such as taking off headphones or taking a break from noisy environments for 20-30 minutes. If you are exposed to noisy environments for a long time due to work, you can choose to wear noise-proof or noise-reducing earplugs to minimize damage.

(2) Stop picking: Earwax is medically called cerumen, which is formed by the normal secretion of the cerumen glands in the ear canal skin combined with dandruff. Generally, a small amount of earwax can be discharged on its own. Picking the ears can easily damage the skin of the external auditory canal and bring bacteria into the external auditory canal, causing inflammation. If the eardrum is perforated accidentally, it is easy to cause infection and otitis media, which will affect hearing.

If you really can't help it, the editor suggests that you can use a cotton swab dipped in alcohol to gently wipe it, but remember not to poke too deep!

(3) Use medications with caution: Try to avoid using ototoxic drugs, as these drugs can easily cause ear poisoning and damage hearing.

III. Intervention and rehabilitation of deafness

In addition to common medical interventions such as drugs, "compensation" and "reconstruction" are also important intervention methods for deafness, which cannot be achieved without "hearing aids" and "cochlear implants". However, don't think that you can "hear clearly" or "speak clearly" just by wearing "little ears"! Especially for children with "prelingual deafness", hearing and speech rehabilitation must be carried out in a timely manner to help children keep up with the critical period of language acquisition, minimize the impact of hearing loss on life, and allow them to integrate into mainstream society faster and better.

"Love your ears" starts from an early age. Only through early screening, early diagnosis, early intervention and early rehabilitation can we truly achieve unimpeded communication!