By: Amanda Womac
Published Oct. 29, 2010

Regardless of the decade you spent your teenage years in, your parents probably yelled on more than one occasion, “Turn that music down!” And, like the typical teenager, you probably shrugged off their suggestions and turned it up to drown them out.

As much as I hate to admit it, our parents were (and still are) right. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1 out of 5 teenagers in the United States have some level of hearing loss.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston looked at hearing tests for 5,000 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 who had their hearing tested as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. They divided the teens into two groups, one from 1988 to 1994 and the second from 2005 to 2006, and compared the results of hearing tests between the timeframes.

Results from the study showed a 30 percent increase in hearing loss among teens from the 2005 to 2006 group, which researchers believe is being caused by increased exposure to loud music from iPods and other types of devices.

Of those affected, most experienced a slight hearing loss. However, 1 in 20 teenagers in the United States have a hearing loss bad enough that it could limit their ability to listen to people in general.

Researchers warn that hearing loss is not trivial, especially to school-age children as it can have an effect on their ability to learn. Hearing loss also has implications on social interactions. If children are constantly asking people to repeat things, it may seem like they are not in touch with the group, which may affect their ability to fit in with their peers.

Say What?
Temporary hearing loss from going to a rock concert or mowing the yard comes back. However, if you consistently exposure your eardrums to loud noises, the multiple instances of temporary loss can add up to become permanent. Typical symptoms of hearing loss include ringing in the ears, difficulty understanding speech or hearing muffled sounds.

Hearing loss from exposure to noise occurs with the hair cells in the inner ear are damaged. These hair cells are critical to our understanding of sound because they convert the electric energy we hear to what our brain reads as sound. Without these hair cells, our brain loses its ability to recognize sound waves and we lose our ability to hear.

Decibels (dB) are used to determine the loudness of sound. Any sound below 85 dB is considered safe. Human speech is registered at about 25 to 35 dB and a normal conversation between two people is measured around 65 dB. The human pain threshold is 120-130 db. Follow us this week on Twitter (@giftofsound) to find out more about the decibel level of 10 sounds produced throughout history.

“Turn that Music Down!”
Personal listening devices are a large part of our society and are not going away any time soon. However, there are precautions both the company and users of the device can take to help cut down on potential hearing loss.

Built into that famous iPod by Apple is a volume maximum cap setting, which can be set to reduce the amount of sound intensity from the music. Parents can set a password on the iPod before giving it to a child to keep that child from changing the volume cap. Unfortunately, this is a user-related control which means it is up to the user to take responsibility and use the volume cap.

If you have a pretty penny to protect your hearing (about $230), then you may be interested in the Atrio Special Edition earbuds from Future Sonics, maker of professional earbuds for on-stage recording and personal use. These earbuds use proprietary drivers to reproduce low frequencies with more clarity, which reduces the need to increase the volume to hear music or drown out background noise.

People are becoming more and more aware that hearing loss is no longer just associated with growing older. As our society gets louder and louder, we need to take the necessary precautions to protect our hearing so we can still hear the finer things in life, such as wind chimes, birds and the laughter of children.

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Study finds New York street noise could eventually lead to hearing loss