Mild hearing loss but everyone is mumbling!

That makes a lot of sense.

I don’t understand what that has to do with this. Can you please explain what you mean?

@Sallyinthesky mentioned difficulty with specific voices. Difficulty is multifaceted but even those with normal hearing are not able to hear all voices equally well. Sometimes HOH folks struggling with specific voices is due to the particular voice and hearing loss. Sometimes it is just a difficult voice to hear.

Hi Leahhiz, as everyone else mentioned, it could be an APD (Auditory Processing Disorder). Ask your audiologist to run an SRT test (Speech Recognition Test).

But even without the presence of APD, you may try hearing aids to see if using them could improve your speech intelligibility. This article discusses this matter: https://www.hearingnow.co.uk/learning/hearing-aid-for-people-with-no-hearing-loss4

I’ve been confused about whether this was a post about not being able to hear well without hearing aids or with hearing aids. It appears that it’s about not being able to hear well without hearing aids while having a mild hearing loss. This would be expected. I’m a little surprised that the idea that audiologist wouldn’t fit a mild hearing loss. In my experience ENTs tend to underestimate mild hearing loss, but most modern clinicians do not.

This post is about my hearing loss being in the mild range and yet I truly can’t hear. I have a cookie bite pattern upper-mid-range bilateral loss. This is exactly where speech registers and that’s what I can hear but often not understand (sounds like mumbling).

I’m not looking for diagnosis or diagnostic suggestions. I just wanted to hear from people with the same experience. My hearing loss is congenital. I’ve had it as long as I can remember and I’m soon 56.

Thank you for asking for clarity on the original post!

You don’t have a cookie bite loss, you have a 4kHz notch, for what it’s worth. But that’s sort of neither here nor there.

That it was congenital and you’re in your 50s maybe makes more sense as to why you’ve experienced audiologists dismissing the loss historically, particularly if it’s been a bit progressive. These days we’d fit that loss on a child but forty years ago we may not have. And these days if 2kHz was normal we still wouldn’t fit a child with 4kHz loss until they were old enough for a transparent fit.

Yes, all of that. “Mid-frequencies” are more ~1-3 kHz. Her audiogram looks a bit more cookie-bitey than it is because the audiogram itself is laid out unusually with lots extra space dedicated to high freuqency octaves and inter-octaves. Compare it against, say, the audiogram that someone has in their avatar which uses a more standard lay-out.

4kHz notch audiograms are fairly common. I see them in children with mild congential loss which often shows up as a very mild loss at ONLY 4 kHz and then progresses (and then we aid) or not (and then we just monitor and support in school). Anecdotally, I usually see it in children without clear etiologies (i.e. nothing necessarily shows up on current genetics, and not a cCMV pattern). But 4kHz notches are also common in adults with a history of job-related noise exposure. Or pediatrics can also have a history of noise exposure; some things in the NICU can be noisy if the birth was complex. 4 kHz just seems to be a vulnerable area in the cochlea. Hearing aids support it fairly well, whereas a mid-frequency cookie-bite is often more complicated. Pediatric chemotherapeutrics will also hit 4 kHz, but tends to just be sharp high frequency sloping (no return after 4 kHz).

In my case, I suspect it could be congenital but have no definitive evidence. My father had the same type of hearing loss (wore hearing aids for it in his 40’s) and I’ve been not hearing well for as long as I can remember.

Thanks for your inputs in this group!