Very Loud Music Can Cause Hearing Loss In Adolescence

Very Loud Music Can Cause Hearing Loss In Adolescence.
Over the finish two decades hearing sacrifice due to "recreational" noise exposure such as blaring blackjack music has risen among adolescent girls, and now approaches levels previously seen only amid adolescent boys, a new study suggests. And teens as a whole are increasingly exposed to snazzy noises that could place their long-term auditory health in jeopardy, the researchers added. "In the '80s and dawn '90s young men experienced this kind of hearing damage in greater numbers, undoubtedly as a reflection - of what young men and young women have traditionally done for farm and fun," noted study lead author Elisabeth Henderson, an MD-candidate in Harvard Medical School's School of Public Health in Boston.

And "This means that boys have usually been faced with a greater caste of risk in the form of occupational noise exposure, fire alarms, lawn mowers, that sympathetic of thing. But now we're seeing that young women are experiencing this same level of damage, too". Henderson and her colleagues piece their findings in the Dec 27, 2010 online version of Pediatrics.

To explore the risk for hearing damage among teens, the authors analyzed the results of audiometric testing conducted centre of 4,310 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19, all of whom participated in the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Comparing booming noise uncovering across two periods of time (from 1988 to 1994 and from 2005 to 2006), the line-up determined that the degree of teen hearing loss had generally remained relatively stable. But there was one exception: teen girls.

Between the two investigate periods, hearing loss due to loud disturbance exposure had gone up among adolescent girls, from 11,6 percent to 16,7 percent - a plain that had previously been observed solely among adolescent boys. When asked about their past day's activities, look at participants revealed that their overall exposure to loud noise and/or their use of headphones for music-listening had rocketed up, from just under 20 percent in the overdue 1980s and early 1990s to nearly 35 percent of adolescents in 2005-2006.

But increased headphone-use, the authors noted, did not appear to be the underlying cause of the enhancement in hearing disappointment among teen girls. Instead, the authors noted that by 2005-2006 girls appeared to be experiencing comparable amounts of exposure to recreational noise as boys, while being less likely to use hearing protection. The authors also speculated that the begin in hearing loss among girls could, in large measure, exemplify an increased exposure to factors not included in the survey - the extremely loud music often found in lodge or music concert settings.

So what's your average club-going American teen to do? "Use protection," advised Henderson. "I mean, when she's on division Lady Gaga certainly has some kind of ear block in her ear to protect herself, so why shouldn't her fans? Clear pandemonium blockers put in the ear lower the decibel that you are exposed to in that environment. And in terms of headphones, I would conjecture kids should get the ones that have sound-blocking capabilities.

The ones that muffle outside noise, so you don't have to oddity up the volume to the max when you're listening to music". For his part, Dr Donald G Keamy, a Boston-based surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, as well as an don in the departments of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School, expressed no surprise with the findings.

And "Certainly the be upstanding of iPods and other devices of that sort is a factor, since everyone's using them," he suggested. "But with rate to concerts, there have been other studies that have measured someone's hearing before and after a concert, and found that right after there is a temporary deprivation - which implies that there's acoustic damage to the middle ear that the ear may initially be on the mend from.

But over time and over repeated exposure it can lose the ability to recover from that. And of execution the problem extends beyond concerts. Kids that mow the lawn or use guns in hunting - those sorts of things mean terrible noise exposure, and without protection there's a risk for hearing failure as life goes on site. So I would say what I say to my patients who come in with pre-existing hearing loss: 'use protection'".