Woman suffering from a rare form of hearing loss can't hear male voices but can clearly hear women

Waking up to a drastic change in your body is a scary thing in itself. Now if the said change is unusual and rarely heard of, it can be quite difficult to cope with it. A woman woke up one day and she couldn't hear her boyfriend anymore but she could still hear other women. Now it might sound fantastical but there's a real condition that causes such a hearing loss. It is called low-frequency hearing loss or reverse pattern hearing loss, as per Daily Mail.

Such a hearing loss renders a person unable to hear low-frequency or male voices. It all started when a woman named Chen went to bed with a ringing in her ears and nausea the night before she lost her ability to hear men. The woman from Xiamen, China, immediately rushed to the hospital when she identified this strange phenomenon the next morning. Doctors were quite surprised to hear about her condition as most patients with hearing loss stop hearing high-frequency voices first. However, soon enough a specialist diagnosed her with reverse pattern hearing loss. The condition reportedly impacts only one in 13,000 people. The doctor believes that stress and lack of sleep might have caused the woman's hearing loss.

At the city's Qianpu Hospital, ENT Specialist Dr. Lin Xiaoqing diagnosed the woman after she was able to hear her voice clearly. "She was able to hear me when I spoke to her, but when a young male patient walked in, she couldn't hear him at all," Dr. Xiaoqing said. The patient admitted that she had been working late into the night for many days and had been under quite a lot of stress. The condition can also be caused by genetics where certain people are never able to hear low-frequency sounds. However, the ENT specialist is glad that the diagnosis was made quickly and thus she expects the patient to make a full recovery.

Usually, the condition can be quite difficult to diagnose as several patients as well as medical patients are not aware of its existence. According to Thigpen Hearing Center, the condition impacts only 3000 people in the US and Canada combined. Normal hearing aids don't work for this condition as they are normally created for high-frequency hearing loss that commonly affects people. Surprisingly, the condition also affects how one hears vowels.

"Vowel sounds tend to have more low-pitch energy compared to consonants and contribute more to our sense of loudness, while high-pitched consonants contribute more to speech clarity and distinguishing between one word and another," Patricia Johnson, a doctor of audiology, told Business Insider. According to Dr. Johnson, the kind of hearing loss Chen suffered can be treated through a steroid injection through the eardrum. However, in many cases, the symptoms can't be reversed and a patient might have to use hearing aids.

Johnson also suggested that people should receive additional support alongside hearing aids if they experience such symptoms. She also shared ways of preventing this rare form of hearing loss. The doctor shared that exercises that are good for the heart are good for the ears as well. People should also avoid loud and noisy environments to prevent such hearing loss.