Cancer treatment and hearing loss – Healthy Hearing
While life-saving, many cancer chemotherapy drugs come with serious side effects. These include hearing-related side effects such as hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in your ears) and balance problems. While sometimes these side effects are temporary and get better after treatment ends, often they’re permanent.
If you’re about to undergo cancer treatment—or have a child in those circumstances—here’s what you need to know.
Cancer treatment typically re…….
While life-saving, many cancer chemotherapy drugs come with serious side effects. These include hearing-related side effects such as hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in your ears) and balance problems. While sometimes these side effects are temporary and get better after treatment ends, often they’re permanent.
If you’re about to undergo cancer treatment—or have a child in those circumstances—here’s what you need to know.
Cancer treatment typically relies on a trio of treatment options: radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy, often performed in conjunction—for instance, a person may have surgery followed by a course of radiation and chemotherapy.
All three cancer treatment options have the potential to damage hearing, depending on the location of the cancer.
Surgery
If you have a form of cancer that requires surgery in the brain, ear, or auditory nerve, hearing problems could occur, according to the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS). Removing a cancerous tumor, for instance, might cause damage to the ear.
Radiation
During radiation treatment, high-energy waves or particles are used to destroy or damage cancer cells. If radiation is needed anywhere in the head and neck, it can potentially lead to two types of hearing loss:
- Conductive hearing loss, a type of hearing loss that happens when sound doesn’t make its way to the inner ear, may occur. This is due to the ear canal being narrowed, the eardrum thickening, or other ear changes caused by radiation, according to a 2019 article published in the Journal of Neurologic Surgery. A condition called otitis media with effusion (OME), where fluid collects in the middle ear, occurs in nearly half of people who have radiation therapy in the head and neck, per the article.
- Sensorineural hearing loss, which arises with damage to the inner ear or auditory nerve, can also occur as a result of radiation. Higher doses of radiation are more likely to cause hearing loss, according to the journal article. People under age 3 and over age 50 are at a higher risk for this type of hearing loss, as are people being treated with the chemotherapy treatment cisplatin (more on that in a moment). This type of hearing loss is permanent.
Chemotherapy and hearing loss
Chemotherapy refers to the use of powerful chemicals that are capable of killing cancer cells. In some cases, chemotherapy drugs can be “ototoxic,” which means they are harmful to hearing.
About half of all patients who receive the chemotherapy drug cisplatin develop hearing-related side effects including hearing loss, tinnitus and vertigo. This is known as ototoxicity.
Platinum-based chemotherapy (cisplatin)
This is especially the case for chemotherapy known as platinum-based therapy (…….
Source: https://www.healthyhearing.com/report/53244-Chemo-cancer-and-hearing-loss-tinnitus
