management of presbyacusis
Last reviewed 01/2018
Reassurance that the patient will not go completely deaf is helpful, as is explaining the problem to family and friends and encouraging them to be tolerant.
The main difficulty in treating these patients is to selectively amplify their response to the different frequencies in everyday sounds. Earlier hearing aids offered these patients little benefit as they amplified all frequencies. More recent aids however, permit some selectivity in amplification and should be tried in these patients.
The patient should be informed that aids available on the NHS are just as good as those available privately, which are extremely expensive.
It is important to investigate unilateral sensorineural hearing loss in order to rule out acoustic neuroma.