Cellphones

Cellphones are cochlea killing culprits. Even though they have been cleared of causing tissue damage or brain cancer, they can cause high frequency hearing loss.

A study by the American Academy of Otolaryngology, found that ear warmth, ear fullness and ringing in the ears are early symptoms.

Dr Naresh Panda and fellow researchers in India re-inforced these findings with a study of a hundred cell users, and concluded that four years of heavy usage (an hour a day) diminished the users’ ability to hear high frequencies, making it hard for them to distinguish between certain sounds.

The cause? Electromagnetic waves emitted by handsets. ‘This radiation can affect your inner-ear mechanics over time,’ says Panda, who suggests always using a headset to move the cellphone away from your ear.

Sound solutions

Dial down the volume of your phone, activate vibrate mode and cut down on the time you hold the phone to your ear.

Concerts and nightclubs

People often sweat in clubs and at concerts and dehydration is not good for inner-ear function. Steer clear of drinking too much alcohol in a noisy environment. It causes a specific fluid shift out of the inner ear, which also causes problems and re-disposes it to damage. This also explains why people often feel quite dizzy if they’ve drunk too much – the process affects the fluid in the balance-controlling, semicircular canals of the inner ear. Just don’t use it as an excuse for falling off your chair.

Sound solutions

Take a bottle of water to a music festival and buy bottled water to go with your drinks at a nightclub. When you’re hitting the rock concert, beware of the sound levels and steer clear of the speakers. If you have a ringing in your ears when you go to the bathroom between sets, you’re damaging your ears. Invest in foam earplugs from your local chemist. They can knock off 30 decibels if inserted properly.

Lifestyle choices

Unhealthy habits can play a part in hearing loss. For instance, smoking and chronic heavy drinking may damage blood vessels in the ears, affecting your hearing. And those aren’t the only lifestyle factors. There’s no convincing evidence that conditions such as diabetes mellitus, hyper-cholesterolaemia and hyperlipidaemia, and atherosclerosis are associated with hearing loss, although common sense tells us that they should be harmful to one’s hearing. High blood pressure and cholesterol can only make conditions worse.

Sound solutions

Drop the smoking and cut back on the booze. Add some green, leafy vegetables to your eating plan.

Genetics and disease

Sadly, there are a number of genetic factors that can affect hearing loss. Below is a pared down list of some common ones. If you’ve been affected by any, or need clarification, contact an ENT specialist.

a) HIV – the virus not only affects the cochlea, but also may cause damage to the auditory nerve. People with Aids also tend to suffer from middle ear disease, which produces a conductive hearing loss.

b) Head trauma.

c) Ototoxic medication, platinum-based chemo-therapeutic agents and certain diuretics.

d) Viral infections like measles, mumps and cytomegalovirus.

e) Otosclerosis – a genetic condition in which the stapes (part of the ossicles or middle-ear bones) becomes fixed in the oval window leading into the inner ear. This can be corrected surgically.

f) Meningitis – anyone recovering from meningitis should be seen by an ENT specialist within six weeks of recovery.

g) Various diseases. Examples: syphilis, autoimmune diseases, congenital disorders, benign and malignant brain tumors.

Sound solutions

Research your family tree and see an ENT specialist.

Testing, Testing, One, Two, Three…

There are a number of ways you can check if you are losing your hearing. Read on (if that’s not one of the only senses you want left) for a summarized list of the symptoms you should be watching out for:

1. Certain sounds seem very loud.

2. High-pitched sounds such as ‘s’ or ‘th’ are hard to distinguish from one another.

3. It’s hard to understand speech – vowels are all lower frequency but consonants are high.

4. Men’s voices are easier to hear than women’s ones.

5. Ringing in the ears (tinnitus).

If you have any of those symptoms, it’s time to see an ENT specialist and an audiologist. Your action plan to save your hearing will depend on the severity of your present sense of hearing (or lack of it), as you can choose just to prevent further hearing loss, or you can seek some medical intervention, either through hearing aids or surgery. The first step? A list of things you can do to prevent hearing loss.

Save your Hearing

Mute the commercials while watching TV. When you hit the volume button again after the ads, you’ll be surprised how loud it is and turn it down.

Stick your fingers in your ears .When you know there’s going to be a loud noise or if you’re trying to escape a noisy situation, use your fingers as makeshift ear protectors – it actually does help.

Step away. Doubling the distance halves the sound pressure. Research suggests that hair cells can recover if you rest your ears and keep noise below 85 decibels for 48 hours.

Don’t skimp on protection. If you work in a high-noise environment, you need proper hearing protection, depending on the noise levels and the duration of exposure. Be proactive – the effects are cumulative and you will not notice them after a single exposure. For quality control: hearing protectors are on properly if your voice sounds louder and deeper to you.

Have daily protein shakes. If you want to safeguard the cilia that remain, lower the volume and raise a glass of whey protein. Whey not only helps you build muscle, but also boosts your body’s production of glutathione, an antioxidant that University of Buffalo researchers found could limit noise-induced hearing loss in mice. They say it should have a similar protective effect in humans.

If you’ve already sustained serious hearing loss, however, then these tricks are not going to be enough. What is essential is that you see both an ENT specialist and an audiologist. Certain conditions affecting one’s hearing can be treated medically or surgically.

Both surgery and hearing aids carry advantages and disadvantages and these need to be explained thoroughly to the patient. Sadly, there are no magic pills that can restore your hearing to its original quality, but hearing aids are one way to improve it considerably. The new digital versions are much smaller and more inconspicuous. Even better, they can separate background noise, say in a restaurant, from speech with startling clarity. They can be divided up into categories:

a) Traditional hearing aids. Behind the ear (BTE) or in the ear (ITE) devices. ITEs may look better, but don’t necessarily deliver sufficient amplification for the more severe hearing losses.

b) Implantable devices. A bone-anchored hearing aid or middle-ear implantable device. These are highly-specialized devices that all have an external component behind the ear.

c) Cochlear implants. These devices convert sound into an electric current, which is then transmitted down an electrode array implanted directly into the cochlea. This treatment involves intensive rehabilitation to get a child or adult to hear correctly.

Submitted By: Sandra Prior Sandra Prior runs her own bodybuilding website at http://bodybuild.rr.nu Published At: Isnare Free Articles Directory http://www.isnare.com

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Most of us are great lovers of music whether it is classical, operatic, modern jazz, country or any number of different and wonderful varieties of music here and around the world. But listening to it can come at a price if we are not too careful.

Whether you’re a musician or just a music lover, playing your music too loud on a regular basis can cause hearing related problems.

For example, if you’re one of those people who like to drive around in a “boom box car” with the music up full blast you should consider turning the music down quite a bit.

Those “boom box cars” can generate up to 130 decibels of sound, which is very near if not over the human hearing pain threshold. A typical value for this threshold of pain is 120 decibels.

To put things into perspective, a soft whisper is about 30 decibels while a train is around 100 decibels. The average rock concert is around 120 decibels, which is right at the pain threshold.

On a personal note, I wear earplugs to every concert I attend as a precaution, since prolonged exposure to sound pressure levels in excess of the threshold of pain can cause physical damage, potentially leading to impairment. It’s important to keep in mind that hearing-induced loss is permanent.

Hearing impairment is measured by the amount of level of loss in what are called decibels (dB) hearing level (HL). Decibels are like degrees of a thermometer. As temperature increases, so do the number of degrees. As the volume of sound increases, so do the number of decibels. A normal conversation will usually range between 45 and 55 dB. A baby crying falls around 60 dB and busy downtown traffic can be almost painful at 90 dB. If you can hear sounds between 0 and 25 dB most of the time, your hearing is pretty normal and you most likely don’t need an aid, although it could enhance your abilities in some situations. If you only hear sounds above 25 dB HL, your loss may be mild, moderate, or severe. These terms will be discussed in more detail in the next paragraph.

Hearing loss can be basically categorized in four ways: mild, moderate, severe, and deaf. Mild loss is considered to be a loss up to 40 decibels, which will usually lead to trouble in hearing ordinary conversation. Moderate hearing loss is a loss of between 40 and 60 decibels. This usually means that voices must be raised for the impaired person to hear them. Severe loss, which is loss over 60 decibels, would require that people shout for the impaired person to hear them. According to the World Health Organization, the term “deaf” should only be applied to individuals with impairment so severe that they cannot benefit from sound amplification or hearing aid assistance.

Even the slightest loss of hearing can make life difficult. Although conversation is audible at low frequencies which usually means the deeper voices, it’s much more difficult with higher pitched voices. This is because with typical loss, the ability to hear high sounds is the first to go, which means it will be harder to hear birds or women’s voices. As the problem worsens, the loss of the lower tone reception soon follows.

A major problem with hearing loss is that 90% of the time the loss is so subtle and gradual that people don’t always notice it until it’s too late and some loss has occurred. Additionally, musicians most likely suffer from not just hearing loss but also have ringing in their ears and pitch-perception problems, which might cause them to inadvertently play a C sharp note instead of a straight C. Some musicians, especially those who start out young such as violinists, start losing their hearing as early as the age of 10.

Many musicians now use ear monitors to keep down the levels of sound they absorb on the stage while performing, he said. These monitors look like little hearing aids with wires attached to them and they enable each musician to precisely control how loud it is in their ear. Oddly enough, it has been found the musicians who play classical music have a greater significance of hearing loss than do rock musicians. This is based on the fact classical musicians have a tendency to play more concerts, teach several hours a day, and then practice several hours a day so in most cases they put in more hours than do rock musicians.

Music lovers should moderate in the length of time and level of loud music to which they expose their ears.

Author: Denise Villani

Denise Villani an author and the webmaster of several article directories. Find more articles and information by visiting ITZDeevSense.com

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Nearly one million people in the UK are deaf or hard of hearing.

Some of these people are born deaf, have gone deaf through illness or infection, or with age. However, some of these people have gone deaf or had their hearing impaired by external noise. This type of hearing loss is known as conductive hearing loss, meaning that sounds from outside aren’t being effectively transmitted to the cochlea (the sound receptor in the ear).

Unfortunately our modern world is quite noisy – it is noisy in the street, at work and even in the home. If you have never thought before about how everyday sounds could be damaging your hearing, then here are some examples of the common causes of hearing damage and how you can prevent damage impairing your own hearing.

Sound is measured in decibels: the higher the number of decibels the louder the noise. Your ear can only endure high decibel levels for a certain length of time. At the lower end of the sound spectrum you will find noise such as a motorcycle engines, lawn mowers or hairdryers. All of these sounds measure around 90 decibels and can be endured by the ear for around 8 hours. However, it is unwise to push your ear to this limit for any extended period of time.

Chainsaws or car engines measure around 110 decibels. These sounds can only be realistically endured for 2 hours before they begin to affect your hearing. This really isn’t very long. If you work with this type of machinery, have your head under the hood of a car throughout the day, or are involved with anything with a similar volume level you will need to take regular breaks. If these levels of noise are in a work environment, there are likely to be Health and Safety guidelines in effect. However, if you are working with such equipment in your own home, you certainly need to be aware of the potential damage that prolonged exposure to these levels of noise can cause.

Rock concerts and nightclubs are around 125 decibels, which is extremely loud and can be very bad for your hearing. Hardly anyone who goes to a club on a regular basis seems to be aware of the damage being done to their hearing. Most people stay all night at such events whereas these sound levels can only realistically be tolerated safely for around 15 minutes. If you are unlucky enough to work in such an environment then you really are going to have to think long and hard about the damage that could be caused to your hearing.

Finally pneumatic drills, aeroplanes taking off, and sirens give off an amazing 140 decibels. This volume of noise can only be tolerated for a couple of minutes at a time. Once again if you work in the vicinity of these noisy machines, there will almost certainly be guidelines in place. With most loud machinery you will probably be required to wear protective headphones in order to minimise the amount of damage that can be done. This does not just apply for machinery such as pneumatic drills, but also some of the ‘quieter’ examples such as chainsaws.

The good news is that hearing loss caused at work or through recreational activities is avoidable. At work you should make sure that you follow your safety guidelines and ensure that you wear the appropriate ear defenders. Outside of work can be trickier because you are in charge of your own hearing protection. However something as simple as a good quality pair of earplugs can offer you a level of protection that could easily prevent any permanent damage to your hearing.

By: Mark Moon

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

The Earplug Shop is the premier supplier of music earplugs; and ear care products in the UK. Permission granted to re-distribute this article granted as long as a link to our website remains.

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