Hearing loss among teenagers: Why is it so prominent?

The world hearing day is celebrated on 3^rd of March every year to raise awareness on how to prevent deafness and hearing loss and promote ear and hearing care across the world. The objective of this year’s World Hearing Day is to focus on to get control over challenges posed by societal misperceptions and stigmatizing mindsets through awareness-raising and information-sharing, targeted at the public and healthcare providers.

Even though age related hearing loss is a common thing among elder people, there is a growing international concern of noise induced hearing loss of teens as well. There can be various reasons due to which teenagers face the hearing loss such as genetic factors, childhood infections, ingrown and unidentified diseases and noisy social settings which is an uncontrollable exposure such as traffic jams.

But the most common reason of hearing loss is listening to loud music on earphones and headphones. As the sound hits the outer ear and then transmits to the middle ear it goes through a series of bones and tissues and nerves and cells and it targets at part in the inner ear and that has hair cells with it that vibrate and transmit nerve impulses to the hearing center in the brain and the thinking is with high exposure whether that’s one time or prolonged that those hair cells can become damaged and therefore not be able to transmit those nerve impulses to the brain. And therefore, excessively loud noises lead to damaging those cells. According one case study, 80% of the people aged between 13-18 years old listen to music on headphones for 1-3 hours every day.

The common symptoms of early hearing loss are:

• Not being able to listen to whispers.
• Struggling to understand speeches in noisy environments.
• Asking people to repeat themselves more than once.
• Ringing and tingling sound in the ears.
• Difficulty in listening and understanding someone 3 feet away.

The teenagers can fight against this hearing loss by avoiding listening to way too loud music on devices with higher decibels. Mostly smartphones come with a decibel control and teens can use the settings on their devices to keep the volume under 80 decibels. Using earplugs at places of noisy environment can also help. Taking small steps at an early age can help prevent the permanent hearing loss.