ABSTRACT
Elsewhere, in the general population, there have been a number of anecdotal reports of people denying genetic factors as a cause of hearing loss in their children, of being unaware of such hearing loss in their parents and siblings, and attributing it merely to age, noise, or other factors. Thus parents of a deaf child with a clearly dominant family history may insist that the child was deafened as a result of a pertussis infection. Eightyyear-old patients have reported that their parents’ hearing loss was due to “old age” even though it began at the age of 60 and their own hearing loss dated back to such an age or younger.
