Photo credit: Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Hearing loss in old age is often called age-related hearing loss or presbycusis. This implies that hearing loss is part of normal aging, just like the need for bifocals called presbyopia. This article in the Society for Neuroscience’s journal reports that what is commonly called age-related hearing loss is really hair cell loss, indicative of auditory damage caused by noise
That was my conclusion based on a literature review, presented at the 12th Congress of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise in Zurich in 2017.
Another recent report, this time in The Conversation, discusses research in fruit flies that may shed light on what the author calls age-related hearing loss. I don’t know how much noise fruit flies are exposed to–laboratory facilities are not quiet–but I suspect that the effects of whatever molecular changes occur in human ears with aging are compounded by cumulative noise exposure over one’s lifetime
Our ears are like our eye and our knees–we only have two of each. We don’t stare into the sun. We wear sunglasses when outdoors in bright light. In fact, sun exposure causes cataracts. We try not to injure our knees, although these can be surgically replaced.
And we need to protect our ears so they last us a lifetime.
Avoiding noise-induced hearing loss is simple: avoid exposure to loud noise, and if one can’t avoid that, use hearing protection.
Because if a noise sounds too loud, it is too loud.
