Deafblindness

This is one condition used to define state on visual and hearing impairment. This is also known as Dual-sensory impairment or at times referred to as multi-sensory impairment. The condition has lot of unique conditions under the term deafblindness. They can be different in many ways, with some loosing complete functionality of both the hearing and vision, with some people loosing some aspects of it. There are huge number of people who are suffering from medical condition like that, and as per the statistics around 23,000 people are some how affected by it. There could be almost 2,50,000 people who have some or the other problem related to vision and hearing abilities. The condition is actually of two types, known as congenital deafblindness and acquired deafbliness. In the congenital type one is born with some disorder but in the acquired type, there is loss of these abilities due to some event during their lifetime.

Symptoms

For hearing loss, people may suddenly feel a loss of hearing. Now this could happen as an outcome of an infection or some kind of injury. The person suffering from hearing loss would also see that speech and noises are indistinct, inability to understand the conversation with background noise, and also starting to ask people to speak loudly in order to clearly understand. When people have loss of vision, then they may see symptoms like pain in eyes, blurring, halos around light, and night vision reduction as signs of losing vision. It is always advisable to contact the doctor in case, any of these signs is seen.

Causes

For congenital deafblindness, a quite infectious viral illness called Rubella is credited. It can happen to a pregnant woman and cause damage to the baby in the womb. With new drugs in the market, over time the rate of rubella has seen a dip of 90%. In case of premature birth and problems associated to it, the outcome can show up as deafblindness. Any excessive smoking or alcohol intake can cause risk to the unborn child. In case of a genetic condition, the condition can happen and the syndrome is known as CHARGE which is a rare phenomenon. There could be other causes to it like aging, accidents. Same way hearing can also get affected with time and age.

Diagnosis

The diagnosis can be done via Clinical tests to check the hearing and vision capabilities. Also there could be some functional tests conducted to check how the individual uses his or her functionalities.

Treatment

The treatment begins if the condition is diagnosed to be curable. The sight conditions which are treatable are cataracts and glaucoma. The treatable hearing conditions are otitis media, accumulated earwax. There are also ranges of equipment available to assist any support.

Prevention

Rubella should be immunized for if conceiving a baby. The child should also receive MMR vaccine. The eyes should be tested in at least two years and also ears should be taken care following a regular checkup with the doctor. Eyes should be kept dry and clean and same way proper hygiene be maintained for
ears.