I’m just curious, I had a SSHL in 2016, this left me with severe profound high frequency loss in my R ear… I can’t remember reading about anyone having a sudden low frequency hearing loss. Is this a possible occurrence? Or is this usually caused by disease?
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I read that sudden low frequency loss can be heart related but unsure if that’s correct or if only one of the reasons.
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Yes it’s possible. In my only very anecdotal experience, it’s more likely to recover than sudden high frequency loss.
We don’t really know what’s going on in SSNHL. It’s often imagined, once other causes are ruled out, that a virus is causing inflammation in the auditory nerve. Since high frequencies are coded around the outside of the nerve as it runs through the skull, it would maybe make sense that these ones are more likely to be damaged. Although high frequency hair cells within the cochlea also seem to be more vulnerable to damage generally, so maybe it’s something else going on. It may be that low-frequency sudden loss is the result of a different process than high frequency loss. Endolymphatic hydrops, maybe. Some low frequency sudden loss patients later turn out to be Merniere’s patients, but only a subset. The cochlea is a little black box that we cannot get into while someone is alive, so hard to know what’s going on.
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