Ear, Nose and Throat
Autoimmune Inner Ear Disease (AIED)
Autoimmune Inner Ear Disease or Autoimmune Hearing Loss is, at least at this point, I think I’m seeing it a little more. When you say autoimmune it means that somehow our protective device, our immune system rather than attacking external or invasive organisms or bacteria it’s actually attacking our own body for some reason it doesn’t recognize and that’s why it’s called autoimmune process. So one of the places it can attack is your inner ear. It leads to hearing loss it leads to dizziness and other inner ear symptoms.
To be honest we don’t really know why it occurs. Just like a lot of times we don’t know why people get other types of autoimmune processes. Presumably there is some mix of genetic disposition for some people and then you get some environmental factors that leads to having that occur.
The common symptom that makes us suspicious that somebody has autoimmune diseases is a sudden drop in hearing. Typically people may wake up one day and say my god I can’t hear on that side anymore. And get ringing in the ear, and get some dizziness associated with it as well.
The treatment is steroids. if we can diagnose and discover the person who is losing their hearing early the steroid can reverse and sometime we can get the hearing all back its important after hearing this when you hear someone say my hearing is gone don’t wait see somebody quickly because its possibly this. So you can be treated and it can be reversed.
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