City Noise Positively Correlates with Hearing Loss

It turns out where you live might determine whether you'll have hearing loss. A study conducted by the German company Mimi Hearing Technologies (http://ift.tt/2lluGPM) and Charité University Hospital in Berlin found hearing loss has a 64 percent positive correlation with noise pollution levels in a city. Researchers used data from 200,000 hearing tests conducted on Mimi's hearing test app in 50 cities worldwide to calculate the average hearing loss of each city, which was then used to assign each city a hearing loss rank and noise pollution rank. The two ranks were then combined to create the combined hearing loss index. Guangzhou, New Delhi, and Cairo topped the list, while Zurich, Oslo, and Vienna were found to be least afflicted by noise pollution.

These findings are preliminary and have yet to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication, according to an article about the study in The Nation. (Mar. 4, 2017; http://bit.ly/2lKWcq8.) But Henrik Matthies, managing director of Mimi Hearing Technologies, said these results are robust. "The fact that noise pollution and hearing loss have such a tight correlation points to an intricate relationship." Matthies told AFP. Mimi published these findings in celebration of this year's World Hearing Day. The complete results and more information about the study's methodology is available here. 

Published: 3/10/2017 9:30:00 AM

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