Hearing Loss Does Not Need To Accompany Aging!
A recent US survey has concluded from its findings that hearing loss may not necessarily be genetically determined to always accompany the aging process. The results could lend greater support to the accurate diagnoses of the causes of hearing damage.
In a recent large-scale study of the hearing of 5,275 adults born between 1902 and 1962, researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health showed that good hearing was being retained for longer than the previous generation.
Of the study group of men now in their early 60s (those born between 1944 and 1949), 36.4 percent had a hearing impairment, which compared favourably against men born between 1930 and 1935, of whom 58.1 percent had a hearing impairment at the same age.
If hearing was being lost at the same rate as their parents did, about 65.5 million Americans would be hearing-impaired by 2030. This new study suggests the number is likely to be closer to 50.9 million.
Since first tracking deafness causes from 1993, the present hearing loss study, began in 2005, and part of two long-term population studies, provides important evidence that age-related hearing loss is not inevitable!
Helping to better understand factors which favour preservation of hearing function, will encourage the development of strategies to prevent hearing loss associated with functional declines in older adults.
If the results suggest that hearing loss is not a normal part of aging, then there are actions that can be taken do to delay hearing loss.
Most important of these actions are key factors relating to noise induced hearing loss, which could include stricter rules about workplace noise exposure, especially in areas such as mining, ship building, manufacturing and nuclear power.
Generally, most short-term exposure leads to temporary hearing loss but it is in environments where many years of day-to-day exposure have traditionally given rise to industrial deafness.
The new finding also have implications for those who spent their working lives within excessively noisy workplaces, and which may now be seen as the chief cause of significant hearing loss – rather than be attributed to so-called ‘normal aging’.