By Ryan Whitt

May is National Speech Language Hearing month, which is a month dedicated to raising awareness about communication disorders and hearing health and the pathologists and audiologists who help those struggling with their hearing health.

The Bluegrass Hearing Clinic helps those who are suffering from hearing loss by providing baseline tests, hearing tests, tinnitus treatment, and hearing

aids.“ Communication disorders make a huge impact on someone’ s ability to communicate with their friends and loved ones, so our job as audiologists is to kind of bridge that,” said Michaela Jiunta, a doctor of audiology at Bluegrass Hearing Clinic.

Hearing loss can result in other health concerns such as cognitive decline, loss of balance, dementia, and even depression.

Jiunta says that one of the greatest risks of hearing

loss is the loss of balance leading to more falls, which can be fatal depending on the age of the person suffering from it.

According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion teens are at risk of avoidable hearing loss due to unsafe listening. Jiunta echoes this, saying that noise exposure leads to the greatest number of hearing loss cases in Madison County.

“ As we have more technology and we have headphones in our ears at

all time, we’ re not tracking how loud that music can be,” said Jiunta.“ I’ ve seen an influx of patients that are younger that are coming in with hearing loss that was completely avoidable.”

Over 740 million people worldwide have tinnitus. The World Health Organization estimates that there are about 466 million people with what they classify as disabling hearing loss, which is about 6.1 % of the world’ s population.

“ Hearing loss is once