Hearing loss can attribute to decrease in health-related quality of life, increase in social isolation and decline in social engagement, which are all risk factors for increased risk of developing depression symptoms. Spoken language ability
Post-lingual deafness is hearing loss that is sustained after the acquisition of language, which can occur due to disease, trauma, or as a side-effect of a medicine. Typically, hearing loss is gradual and often detected by family and friends of affected individuals long before the patients themselves will acknowledge the disability. Post-lingual deafness is far more common than pre-lingual deafness. Those who lose their hearing later in life, such as in late adolescence or adulthood, face their own challenges, living with the adaptations that allow them to live independently. Prelingual deafness is profound hearing loss that is sustained before the acquisition of language, which can occur due to a congenital condition or through hearing loss before birth or in early infancy. Prelingual deafness impairs an individuals ability to acquire a spoken language in children, but deaf children can acquire spoken language through support from cochlear implants (sometimes combined with hearing aids). Non-signing (hearing) parents of deaf babies (90–95% of cases) usually go with oral approach without the support of sign language, as these families lack previous experience with sign language and cannot competently provide it to their children without learning it themselves.
The conclusion of the Cochrane Review was that further research could modify what is now regarding the effectiveness of the evaluated interventions.The Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance has created a hearing impairment calculator based on the ISO 1999 model for studying threshold shift in relatively homogeneous groups of people, such as workers with the same type of job. The ISO 1999 model estimates how much hearing impairment in a group can be ascribed to age and noise exposure. The result is calculated via an algebraic equation that uses the A-weighted sound exposure level, how many years the people were exposed to this noise, how old the people are, and their sex. The models estimations are only useful for people without hearing loss due to non-job related exposure and can be used for prevention activities.