Good Healthcare Requires Treatment of Your Mind, Body, and Soul

4 Head Surgeries Performed To Restore Hearing

2 October 2014 by Hugh Larson

Vibrations from sound waves travel through your ear canals to the tiny suspended bones and hair cells inside. Nerve signals from the movements of these structures travel to your brain where the sounds are processed. If any of the structures inside your ear canals suffer damage, your hearing abilities could decrease or disappear altogether. If this happens, you will need to visit an ENT to receive a diagnosis concerning the cause of your hearing difficulties. If the diagnostic process reveals structural abnormalities, you might need one of the four surgeries listed below to restore your hearing.

Tympanoplasty

Infections can systematically destroy your eardrums' structural integrity. If enough fluid builds up behind the eardrum, its tympanic membrane could rupture. In severe cases, the fluid could damage or displace the tiny stapes bones in your ear canal. When this happens, sounds come through as muffled or completely absent.

Surgeons can restore your hearing to near normal levels by repairing or replacing the membrane and damaged bones. This surgery is called a tympanoplasty. You might need to wait several months to see if the membrane heals without assistance first.

Stapedectomy

If your body suddenly produces bony growths that impede movement of the stapes bones in your ear canal, you will develop gradual hearing loss in that ear. Unimpeded stapes bones vibrate when sound waves pass over their structure. Bony growths reduce or eliminate the vibrations, which makes it appear as if the sound waves did not come through the ear at all.

To repair this problem, surgeons must perform a stapedectomy. During this procedure, surgeons remove the bony growths and repair the stapes bones. If the growths severely damaged the tiny bones in your ear, surgeons may replace the bones with prosthetic units.

Neuroma Removal

A soft-tissue growth, also known as a tumor, could also damage your inner ear. These tumors, called acoustic neuromas, grow around the nerves in your ear and slowly disrupt your ability to hear. Although these tumors are not usually cancerous, it is important to remove them before they begin to push on structures in the brain.

Since these tumors disrupt the fluid levels in your vestibular system, you might feel quite dizzy and uncomfortable as the growth increases in size. Surgeons typically remove the tumor with help from strong magnification devices designed for surgical procedures. This allows them to avoid damaging the tiny bones and nerves in your ear canal while performing the extraction. However, if the tumor's location impedes its clean removal, you might need to go through radiation therapy instead. 

Cochlear Implant

If a medical condition or genetic abnormality destroyed the hair cells in your cochlea, you may suffer from gradual or sudden hearing loss. Luckily, surgeons can compensate for these losses by installing a cochlear implant. You can receive implants for one or both ears, depending on where the damage lies.

Your nerves cannot show any signs of damage for this implant to work. You may need to try out other types of hearing aids before your physician will agree to install this device. If you decide to have this surgery performed, you will need to heal for several weeks before surgeons turn on the device.

Planning Surgery

Your physician will perform several diagnostic tests, like hearing screenings, MRI scans and blood tests, to find the sure cause of your hearing difficulties. Once you have a diagnosis, your physician will discuss all of the different treatment head and neck surgery options available to you.

Work your way from the least invasive treatments to hopefully find an alternative to surgery. If the other options do not work, schedule the surgery to halt or reverse your hearing loss for good. Surgical options usually restore your hearing immediately after doctors reverse or repair the damage. 

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