Are iPods Behind Rising Teen Hearing Loss?
That’s what the latest analysis of national health data on adolescents shows. Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%. And the reason may not be the ubiquitous earphones that snake from nearly every teen’s ears during most hours of the day. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.) A team headed by Dr. Josef Shargorodsky, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, drew raw numbers from data collected by the government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted over a six-year period in the 1990s and a two-year period more recently. Adjusting for factors such as age, race and exposure to infections that can damage delicate auditory nerves and affect hearing, they found just the kind of slow but significant rise in hearing loss that experts had been predicting in an era in which kid
