More Teenagers Going Deaf —Study

By Eromosele Ebhomele

More youths are going deaf and the proliferation of portable audio players may be to blame, new research has suggested.

The study which further showed that girls were fast catching up with boys when it comes to problems with hearing also found that one in every six teens of  both sexes had hearing loss that could make it harder for them to hear speech and some high-pitched sounds. This was after a study was conducted among boys  and girls who use audio players often.

In the study, published in Pediatrics, author of the study, Elisabeth Henderson of Harvard Medical School in Boston suggested that the youths, especially  girls, were getting exposed to more loud noises.

Traditionally, boys were more likely to be exposed to loud noises from leaf-blowers, firearms, or work machines, Henderson noted – but today, more and more  teens have portable music players, and both sexes are listening to loud music from headphones.

Indeed, the authors found that the percentage of teens who said they had listened to loud music through headphones has increased from 20 percent in the late  1980s and early 1990s to 35 percent in more recent years.

“The kids who reported recent exposures were no more likely to show signs of hearing loss, but it’s still possible that this increase in portable loud music  is having an effect, perhaps explaining why girls have caught up to boys’ levels of hearing loss,” Henderson said adding that, “We’re seeing a lot more kids  being exposed to music recreationally.”

To investigate whether the recent popularity of portable music players is affecting teens’ hearing, Henderson and her colleagues looked at hearing tests  collected from 2,519 teenagers between 1988 and 1994, and 1,791 teenagers between 2005 and 2006.

They considered three types of hearing loss: low-frequency loss, in which people struggle to hear sounds in the low end of the sound spectrum (such as parts  of human speech); high-frequency hearing loss, which affects how well they hear high pitches (such as chimes or a microwave beep, or even kids’ speech); and  noise-induced hearing-threshold shifts in which people have trouble hearing sounds in the middle of the sound spectrum (which can include some human speech  and higher-pitched sounds from musical instruments).

Their investigation revealed that all three types of hearing loss were generally as common in the recent group of teens as they had been during the previous  survey.

But when they looked more closely at the data, they saw that one group – teen girls – had experienced an increase in the rate of noise-induced  hearing-threshhold, from 12 percent in the first survey to 17 percent in the second making her add that: “It’s possible that teenagers, as they become young  adults, will have even more hearing loss.”

Among several things Henderson recommended for teens to protect their ears, she said they should always wear earplugs at loud concerts, buy environmental  noise-cancelling headphones, and keep the volume down.

“A general rule of thumb is you should be able to hear someone talking to you even if you have your earphones on.”

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