Marshall Chasin, Editor of ‘Hear the Music’ Blog on Hearing Health & Technology Matters wrote …..

Those of us in the hearing healthcare industry aren’t immune to the ravages wrought by excessive noise exposure. You don’t think you’re over-exposed? Really? Do you remember the last professional convention you attended? Were there any social functions that were loud? Was your hearing muffled afterwards? Did you have tinnitus? How many of you use power tools, lawn mowers or snow blowers? Loud vacuum cleaners? Loud, whirring blenders for an extended margarita party? How many of you attended your kids’ sporting events this past year? Concerts? Live music? All of these have the potential to give you a noise overdose. The ringing and muffled hearing? That’s a noise hangover. Sure, your ears seem to recover, but at what cost?

It’s time to discard our old assumptions, beliefs and practices regarding noise exposure, and adapt healthier beliefs and practices. We used to believe that Temporary Threshold Shift (TTS) was, well…temporary. Sure, our ears would ring and our hearing would be muffled after those big social events at professional conventions. But that was just temporary. Or was it?

Research on noise exposure by Kujawa and Liberman (2009) challenges our old assumptions and begs us to rethink the concept of TTS. Kujawa and Liberman found that while outer hair cells do recover from noise exposure after a period of rest (with a corresponding recovery of hearing thresholds and otoacoustic emissions [OAEs]), other changes in the basal region of the cochlea do not recover: they found dramatic degeneration of both pre- and post-synaptic elements of the inner hair cells and spiral ganglion cells.

Not only is this damage undetectable using current test protocols (pure tone thresholds, OAEs and auditory brainstem response [ABR] testing) but the loss of spiral ganglion cells is not seen until weeks or months post-exposure. Kujawa and Liberman suggest that noise-induced hearing damage has progressive consequences that we cannot clinically measure, and that may not be evidenced until much later. This damage is likely to be eventually expressed as difficulty hearing in noise and/or tinnitus or hyperacusis.

Does this get you thinking about your own noise exposure, and the noise exposures of your loved ones? I hope so. We have the tools. As hearing health professionals, let’s all resolve, during the coming year, to do a better job of measuring noise exposures and promoting and using hearing protection so we can all have a healthier hearing future.

Read the Blog at: http://hearinghealthmatters.org/hearthemusic/2013/we-cant-always-measure-a-hearing-loss/