What is glue ear (yuck!) and how does it contribute to hearing loss?Children and people with Down syndrome have a higher risk of hearing loss and other hearing problems. This is partly because their ear canals tend to be very small and tend to trap fluids and wax inside. This can also lead to ear infections.
I’ll admit, I didn’t really “get” the whole ear/hearing thing at first, so let me attempt to explain it to you in a simple way. There are 3 basic sections of our ears—the outer, the middle, and the inner ear. These sections are sealed off from each other like little rooms inside your head. Sound waves come through the outer ear (the part you stick Q-tips into even though you’re not supposed to) and bounce off the eardrum. If you can imagine sort of a curtain in between the outer room and middle room, except this curtain is tough and sealed around the edges (kind of like a drum…hey, yeah that’s why it’s called an eardrum!) then you have successfully imagined the outer ear/eardrum. The middle ear is a space that is enclosed and filled with air. It has three tiny awesome bones inside that vibrate when the ear drum vibrates. These tiny bones, or ossicles, are set up so that one end of the bone is touching the eardrum, and the other end is touching another membrane on the other side of the middle ear. That membrane is called the oval window. On the floor of the middle ear is a drain with a tube attached. These are the Eustachian tubes, and they lead to your throat. The inner ear is filled with fluid, and has a really cool seashell-looking thing called a cochlea inside. Attached to the cochlea is the acoustic nerve, which goes to the brain where we process sounds. So now you are imagining these three individual spaces. The sound waves come zooming in the outer ear, bouncing on the eardrum, vibrating the ossicle bones, vibrating the oval window, vibrating the fluid around the cochlea, stimulating the cochlea hairs which “tell” information to the acoustic nerve, the nerve zooms this information to the brain which processes the information into sound. WHEW! A complicated process. But this is important to know when dealing with your child’s hearing. There are two types of hearing loss. Sensory-neural is one, which is damage to the acoustic nerve or the cochlea. Most hearing loss in children with Down syndrome is Conductive Loss. Because the Eustachian tubes are smaller than usual, fluid and wax aren’t able to drain as well. This build up interferes with all that vibrating necessary for hearing. Sometimes the fluid and wax turn into something called Glue ear. It’s a thick build up of whitish sticky mucus in the middle ear, and it’s a problem. Why is this a problem? Stick your fingers into your ears and try to listen to a conversation. It’s like trying to hear underwater. If your child has conductive hearing loss, this is how they are experiencing their world. This situation leads to speech delays, behavior problems, and slow educational progress. Good hearing is essential for development of speech and language. Children with Down syndrome have speech delays as it is. If your child can’t hear properly, his or her chances for clear speech decrease dramatically. What are the symptoms of Glue ear? It can be tough to diagnose glue ear. It is painless, and doesn’t cause usual ear infection symptoms. It causes stuffiness in the ears, but if your child can’t talk yet, they can’t communicate that to you. Instead, they may become irritable and want to be left alone. Sometimes if the child confuses words that sound similar to one another (like bed and head), that can be a clue to have them checked out. How do we fix it?
The best way to drain this yucky fluid is to insert ear tubes.
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