Health encyclopaedia - Alphabetical Topic List

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Treatment of Deafblindness

  Treatment depends heavily on the cause of impairment; hearing and sight will usually need to be treated separately. If the hearing and sight loss is due to a reversible or treatable medical condition, surgery may be an option. For example, cancerous tumours that are affecting sight or hearing may be surgically removed or treated with drugs.

Visual impairment may be helped with the use of glasses or other visual aids. Some people with visual impairment may benefit from using magnifiers, particularly for reading or writing. Type of magnifiers available are:

  • spectacle-mounted magnifiers (commonly known as glasses or spectacles);
  • held-in-the-hand magnifiers, these are usually round or dome shaped and may differ in size depending on the level of visual impairment (generally, the larger the magnifier, the milder the magnification will be – small dome-shaped magnifiers usually provide the most intense magnification);
  • and hung round the neck magnifiers, used to keep the hands free for other tasks.

Other aids available include screen readers, computer software that reads out information on a computer.

Hearing impairment may be improved with the use of hearing aids. There are many different types of hearing aids. The most commonly used types are:

  • the BEHA (Behind-the-Ear-Hearing-Aid), an often skin coloured plastic case containing a microphone, an amplifier and a loudspeaker, which sits just behind the ear and increases the volume of sounds as they enter the ear;
  • the ITEHA (In-the-Ear-Hearing-Aid), a smaller, less powerful hearing aid that sits inside the ear. The ITEHA may not be useful for people with severe hearing impairment as it is too small to contain a powerful amplifier;
  • and the Completely-in-the-Canal-Hearing-Aid, a very small device for people with mild hearing impairment, which fits completely inside the ear canal and is almost unseen outside the ear. People with profound hearing impairment may benefit from a cochlea implant. The cochlea implant transmits sound directly into the ear’s auditory nerve through an electrical wire implanted into the cochlea. The cochlea is a coiled, hollow tube inside the inner ear that enables us to hear.

Research continues into treatments for both sight and hearing impairment and for conditions such as Usher syndrome that cause hearing and sight loss. For example, although there is no recognised cure or treatment for Retinitus Pigmentosa, recent research suggests that a daily 15,000 IU supplement of vitamin A palmitate may help to delay sight loss for people with the condition.