Music Played Through Headphones can Damage the Hearing Mechanism

Hearing music played through headphones either too loud or too long is certainly harmful to hearing, according to a 24-year study of adolescent girls. The study involved 8,710 girls of lower socioeconomic status, whose average age was about 16. Their hearing was tested when they entered a residential facility in the U.S Northeast.

"I had the rare opportunity, as an audiologist, to see how this population changed over the years," said Abbey Berg, lead study author and a professor in the Department of Biology and Health Sciences at Pace University in New York.

In this period, high-frequency hearing loss - a common casualty of excessive noise exposure - nearly doubled, from 10.1 percent in 1985 to 19.2 percent, she found.

Between 2001, when testers first asked about it, and 2008, personal music player use rose fourfold, from 18.3 percent to 76.4 percent.

High-frequency hearing loss increased from 12.4 percent to 19.2 percent during these years, while the proportion of girls reporting tinnitus -ringing, buzzing or hissing in the ears - nearly tripled, from 4.6 percent to 12.5 percent.

Overall, girls using the devices were 80 percent more likely to have impaired hearing than those who did not; of the teens reporting tinnitus, all but one (99.7 percent) were users.

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The study appears online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Source-ANI