Sybil Hall, age.12, of Colorado Springs, Colo., for her question:

WHAT CAUSES PEOPLE TO GO DEAF?

Deafness can mean either a partial or complete loss of hearing. In the United States today, a quarter of a million people are completely deaf while more than 3 million have major hearing problems. Many of the problems could have been prevented if the people had protected their ears from assaults against them or had sought early treatment.

There are three ways a person may become completely or partially deaf. He may have a disease of the inner ear or nerves to the brain. This would be called sensorineural or perceptive deafness.

A second type of deafness is conductive hearing loss. This is caused when the path along which the sound is carried or conducted develops a problem.

The third type is a functional hearing loss. This indicates there is no physical reason for the deafness and that its cause is most likely emotional.

Some hearing losses can be caused by a combination of these three types.

Although destroyed nerves cannot usually be restored to use, hearing aids are used to help carry the sound through the bone rather than normal pathways.

Conductive deafness can result when the external ear opening or passage is blocked by an abnormal accumulation of wax or through a tumor or infection.

Contamination of the middle ear may be the result of bacteria or viruses entering via the eustachian tube, resulting in a hearing loss. If infections can be cleared up with an antibiotic before there is permanent damage to the tissues or bones, then hearing can be restored without the need of surgery.

Sensory hearing loss is due to improper functioning of sound pathways of the inner ear. Neural hearing loss is the result of damage to the fibers of the auditory nerve.

Continued loud or high pitched noise may cause nerve deafness. You should protect yourself against these very common threats to hearing if you come across them in your recreation or other phases of life. Won't you please turn down the volume on your radio?

Sometimes we tend to hear only that which we want to hear. We can understand every word the announcer says when the game is on TV, but we cannot hear Mom when she asks us to take out the trash.

Psychogenic deafness happens when there's a mental shutting off of hearing to an extreme. Patients with hysteria or mental illness may have subconscious desires not to hear things, and as a result may become completely deaf even though physically they have completely normal hearing mechanisms.