Sensorineural hearing loss occurs when damage to any part of the inner ear or neural pathway to the b affects the ability to hear some frequencies. The hearing loss ranges from mild to profound. Besides making hearing faint sounds difficult, this also makes understanding speech and hearing clearly more difficult 3 Causes include genetic conditions, systemic such as syphilis, rubella, ototoxic medications and substances, lesions of the inner ear and auditory nerve, and exposure to loud noise. Presbycusis is usually a sensorineural hearing loss; see