Genes and Hearing Loss

Genes play an important role in congenital hearing loss, causing about 60 percent of deafness in infants. One of the most common congenital (present at birth) abnormalities is hearing loss or deafness, affecting as many as three of every 1,000 babies. Exact data is not available, but it is likely that genes also play an important role in hearing loss in the elderly.

Genes are part of your DNA and give you the traits that make you different from everyone else, your eye color and hair, for examples. Genetics is the study of genes and disorders caused by “abnormal” genes. Genes can become mutated, or changed, and this can cause disorders in our bodies. In addition to gene mutation, other causes of hearing loss at any stage of a person’s life include medical problems, environmental exposure, trauma, and medications.

Hearing loss because of gene mutation is often categorized as “syndromic” versus “non-syndromic.” In both cases, the genes can have different ways of being passed down from parents, the most common being “autosomal dominant” (meaning that if you get the abnormal gene from only one parent, you can develop the condition), or “autosomal recessive” (meaning that two copies of the abnormal gene must be present)…