Who is Considered Hard of Hearing or Deaf?
Hearing loss ranks with arthritis, high blood pressure, and heart disease as one of the most common health conditions. While it is true that the prevalence of hearing loss increases with age, with one out of three individuals over the age of 65 having difficulty hearing, the majority of people with hearing loss (60%) are working-age adults (i.e., 21 to 65 years of age). Approximately 36 million (17%) American adults report some form of hearing loss.1
There are several systems for classifying people who have difficulty hearing. One method is the audiological classification, which classifies an individual based on his/her degree of hearing loss (i.e., minimal, mild, moderate, moderate to severe, severe, and profound). While this classification system provides an objective account of the severity of a person’s hearing loss, it does not provide information about the day-to-day functioning of the person.
Another system is based on a functional classification. In this classification system, people who have hearing loss fall into three main subgroups: (1) those who are hard of hearing; (2) those who are deaf and became so in adulthood; (3) and those who are born deaf or became deaf early in life. Although these three groups all share impaired or absent hearing, they are very different in many ways and have a variety of different characteristics, needs, desires, and ways of communicating.
A major problem with the functional classification system is that there is frequently an overlap between categories, with many individuals fitting into more than one category. For example, there are individuals who were born profoundly deaf or acquired a profound hearing loss early in childhood but communicate using oral means rather than American Sign Language. In addition, an increasing number of individuals today have cochlear implants. When the implant device is turned off, they may be profoundly deaf; however, when the unit is turned on, they function as hard of hearing.
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