New Study Finds Noise Exposure Not Linked to Hearing Loss in Youths

Researchers have found that prolonged or recent noise exposure is not consistently associated with an increased risk of hearing loss among those aged 12-19 based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 1988 to 2010 (JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2017 [Epub ahead of print]). They analyzed the audiometric measurements of 7,036 survey participants in this study; and while there was an overall rise in exposure to loud noise or music through headphones 24 hours prior to audiometric testing, they discovered that the prevalence of hearing loss has dropped to 15.2 percent in 2009-2010, compared with 17 and 22.5 percent in the 1988-1994 and 2007-2008 surveys respectively. The authors concluded that there was no association between noise-induced threshold shift and noise exposures and that their findings call into question previous conclusions that increasing noise exposure is responsible for increasing levels of pediatric hearing loss.

​One of the authors, Dylan Chan, MD, PhD, spoke to the New York Times about the study and attributed the decrease in prevalence to behavioral changes such as avoiding noise and wearing volume-limiting headphones designed for children. "I hope people don't take this as an excuse to say noise-induced hearing loss is not a problem, so we can go back to listening to headphones at full volume," he said. 

Published: 7/28/2017 9:33:00 AM

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