Good cardiovascular health?
39 would be very early for cardiovascular health issues to show up.
Depends on whether you have a condition like hypercholestemia. A brother-in-law had a familial condition (I think both his brother and his father had heart attacks young, too) and he started taking statins at least in his early 40’s and has been on them for the past 20 years or so.
I think it would be a shame to cause Johnmurphy needless worry. You can find documentation on the Internet to support just about anything. Here’s an article from a hearing clinic (have no idea of its validity) on hearing loss and cardiovascular conditions, perhaps mainly intent on drumming up business:
Ah, indeed, I didn’t see the age.
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Johnmurphy, IMHO you should make an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor and get some tests done, including an MRI. There might be something going on that could and should be treated. If not, I think it would be reassuring to have some of the scarier possible causes for your loss ruled out.
Assuming a SN (conductive might be reversible) it’s more than we would usually see, but not exceptional: you’re an outlier in terms of age but:
Flat losses are easier to fix.
You’d suit a IIC/CIC if your canals are big enough, plus the manual dexterity needed for the smallest hearing aids.
You’ll adapt better and faster to hearing aids at your age than you would in 30/40 years time.
Get the best you can afford and don’t be put off by feeling a bit bunged up for the first 2-3 weeks. It’s also possible, that’s what’s causing the decline will burn itself out in the medium term.
It’s not a noise or age-related loss, forget getting any meaningful results from a scan, the a bilateral balance of your loss precludes practically every ‘visible’ diagnosis.
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I found the following OSHA manual on hearing loss interesting and they even have a section on Conductive Hearing Loss (flat loss across the frequency spectrum) with graphic illustration:
https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/new_noise/#hearingloss
Wikipedia has an extensive listing on causes of conductive hearing loss (although Um_bongo’s post above leaves a flat sensorineural hearing loss in as a possibility):
If one does not like non-descriptive lists, it’s easy to find lots of Internet article on conductive hearing loss causes and possible remedies, e.g., 10 Possible Causes of Conductive Hearing Loss (emphasis at end on an audiologist or ENT exam to differentiate between sensorineural and conductive loss).
There’s a priori probability and posteriori probability. One has to be careful not to assign the former probabilities to the latter, i.e., someone shows up at age 39, who’s collapsed, has shortness of breath, pain in chest, etc., you don’t say, “There’s only a 1 in 100,000 chance it’s a heart attack, on to the next thing.” The presenting case changes the probabilities as to what might be involved.
A simpler example would be: “What are the chances I’m going to get a skin infection?” If you’ve scratched yourself, the answer is a lot higher probability than if not.
So here the presenting case is an unusual apparent conductive hearing loss at a young age.
If you already come from a family line with a history of hyperlipidemia/hypercholestemia (as my brother-in-law) does, the a priori chances of having bad outcomes at a very young age are not the same either: Hyperlipidemia: Symptoms, Causes, Treatment, and More
So we might be worrying the heck out of Johnmurphy here, but I imagine early onset of just about anything is a good excuse these days (now that more and more molecular genetic tools are becoming available) to look into whether family history factors might be coming into play in whatever is causing the presenting symptoms (while not disregarding possible environmental causes in the least).
I guess the important thing that Johnmurphy does not mention are what are his bone conductive losses, if any, across the frequency spectrum. Presumably his audi has done these and the results might be available. And maybe the HT audiogram tools should have a way to represent bone conduction results? (guess they could always be textually listed)
I appreciate all the feedback. Trying hard to learn from others as much as possible. Regarding your question- no conductive loss. Thanks.
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The point is that citing statistics for the general population is kinda irrelevant when you’ve arrived at a posteriori condition:
What is posterior probability?
Posterior probability is the revised probability of an event occurring after taking into consideration new information .
What Does a Posterior Probability Tell You?
Bayes’ theorem can be used in many applications, such as medicine, finance, and economics. In finance, Bayes’ theorem can be used to update a previous belief once new information is obtained. Prior probability represents what is originally believed before new evidence is introduced, and posterior probability takes this new information into account.
I used to consider Bayesian probability all a bunch of hogwash and happened to work down the hall from a guy who lived and breathed by it (and eventually won a Nobel Prize - and modestly disclaimed in making his Nobel Prize-worthy advance that he had any inkling that his work would blossom into an idea of that caliber!).
The reason at the time that I dredged up to dispute the value of Bayesian considerations is that you rarely if ever have good enough data on how the posteriori condition, e.g., a patient is diagnosed with FLAT sensorineural hearing loss, affects the posteriori probability, what are the chances that this loss is caused by heart disease (or the reverse Bayesian probability, if a person is diagnosed with some sort of cardiovascular disease, what are the chances that they will suffer hearing loss?).
However, I’ve had to get some new religion. Bayesian probability is highly used in machine learning, e.g., what are the chances in speech recognition that a person said the syllable “er” or the word “dog” - the chances that either the syllable or the word was uttered depend conditionally on what was uttered around it in a Bayesian way and the whole probability is chained together to get an extremely difficult probability calculation (requiring a powerful computer) that a whole phrase was uttered in a particular way, e.g, “dogs love cats” vs. “dogs hate cats.”
So in the same way as speech context, the knowledge that Johnmurphy has very flat, non-conductive, probably sensorineural hearing loss changes the probabilities as to what underlying causes might be relevant, just in the same way that very rapid unilateral hearing loss in just one ear drastically changes the probabilities of what might be likely in the affected individual. It’s just in Johnmurphy’s case, we really have no good idea what the relevant Bayesian probabilities might be for any potentially contributing condition like cardiovascular disease. Could be the same as the a priori general population probability, might not be - but to assert that the probability is the same as before knowing John’s condition is not right, even though it’s entirely possible it’s the correct answer.
BTW, John, there is a slight ambiguity in your answer. I interpreted your answer to mean that you do have a conductive loss of hearing that’s ~identical to your through-the-air loss, indicative that you’re loss is entirely sensorineural. Interesting that audiologists/ENT folks, etc., have never ironed out the ambiguous terminology surrounding the phrase “no conductive loss.” Perhaps all depends on charted data, boxes checked, blanks filled in, and less worry about flinging words alone around.
Heh. What’s ambiguous about no conductive loss? If your bone conduction scores are identical to your air conduction scores, you do not have a conductive loss.
Or if this helps disambiguate things for you–if your air line is at 60 and your bone line is at 40, your conductive loss is 20, not 40.
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Edit_Update: Perhaps the distinction is in the use of the two terms “conduction” vs. “conductive” and “CONDUCTIVE” is only used as an adjective in describing the category status whereas CONDUCTION is used to describe a test of “conductive” status - again, a better choice of terms would have helped. But once one learns something in school, it becomes the gospel…
Audiologists might take for granted language naïve members of the general public misconstrue, i.e., “no conductive loss” means you DO have bone conductive loss, not “no bone conductive” loss but the categorization means the loss you do have is not categorized as “conductive loss” - so audiologists, in one phrase, manage to confusingly refer (from the general public standpoint) to apples and oranges at the same time - they could have picked a somewhat different name for the category or the terminology for status in the category vs. the actual loss measurement. You have a bone conductive loss means no conductive loss, get it?! 
P.S. Sometimes problems in nomenclature arise when names and terms are picked before the underlying bases of the phenomena are fully understood - don’t know if that applies here to tests vs. categories and upstream/downstream flow in hearing but “positive” and “negative” in batteries and which way electricity actually flows would be an example of where they decided on concepts before they understood the underlying basis fully… Which Way Does Electricity Flow?
No it doesn’t. It means you have NO conductive loss.
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I’m baffled by this confusion. But maybe you’re right and I am taking something for granted. Are you thinking of it like. . . “his thresholds via bone conduction are normal, so he has no hearing loss when tested via bone conduction, indicating that his air conduction thresholds are due to a conductive loss”? That IS super confusing. But no one says that.
(edit: I read it again and it did not confuse me. But if I twist my brain around enough I think I can see the issue.)
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As I noted above in a correction as you were typing, I should have said in the two lines above: Moderate loss diagnosis
No CONDUCTIVE loss (in the category status) means you do have a bone CONDUCTION loss (test result) that matches your over-the -air measured loss, i.e. your loss is sensorineural, not CONDUCTIVE status type.
and
You have a bone CONDUCTION loss (test result) that matches your over-the-air loss means that you have NO CONDUCTIVE loss (category status), rather a sensironeural loss.
I could be very wrong - apologies if I am and for being a smartie pants, but I think the distinctions rely on the usage of modifying terms in a base word to tell the listener whether one is referring to a type of hearing test or a category status for a type of hearing loss as determined by that hearing test relative to an over-the-air hearing test.
No, but that would never be said. You would never refer to the bone score as a “bone conduction loss”. Cuz you’re right, that’s very confusing. The conductive loss is the gap between that and the air threshold. People will say “bone line” or “bone scores” but not “bone loss”.
It’s late at night and now the word conduction AND the word bone have lost all meaning through repetition.
I do like semantics though. 
My comments are not worth staying up for! Enjoy a well-earned night’s rest!
The paradox would be, though, that both over-the-air results and bone conduction tests can be graphed on the same chart (chart shows identical OTA and bone conduction results ~superimposed, purloined from OSHA Technical Manual (OTM) | Section III: Chapter 5 - Noise | Occupational Safety and Health Administration):
So lots of people on the forum refer to the depiction of over-the-air results as showing HEARING LOSS but the irony in audiology is that we will not refer to the bone conduction results as showing a BONE CONDUCTION LOSS but just rather low bone scores (whatever that means! ). I would suggest that the different semantics was necessary to keep things straight between bone conduction tests and conductive category status. Maybe clearer semantics is not necessary for well-trained audiologists but for naïve members of the general public, it might be easier to understand what a bone conduction loss means rather than low bone scores. In plain English, the graph above clearly shows both air conduction loss and bone conduction loss compared to normal hearing (although the further irony is that when you see bone conduction results matching over-the-air conduction actual bone conduction is probably normal, i.e., no loss, because the defect is sensorineural (in the inner ear or beyond) - so perhaps it’s the paradoxical nature of the test results that generates the terminology conflicts - like electricity actually flowing in reverse to the classical assumed current path out of a battery-bone conduction is an artificial alternative test-and it’s really a test of the function of the air conduction pathway-an absolutely normal bone conduction test vs. the air conduction test means that you DO have a problem in the air conduction pathway in the outer or middle ear, in my ignorant grasp of the subject).
I think the main thing that makes “bone conduction loss” sound so wrong, is that it implies some abnormality of the skull.
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I take @Johnmurphy 's “no conductive loss” statement to mean that there is no loss present that is determined to be of a conductive nature. I suspect that’s what he intended. But, you know what happens when one assumes.