Month: September 2023

Not many younger or even middle-aged people will think of going for hearing aid tests, even if they don’t seem to be hearing quite as well as they used to. It will often be assumed that poor hearing is entirely the preserve of the elderly.

However, the reality is that it is at a younger age when people do many things to expose their ears to excessive noise, damaging their hearing in the process.

This is particularly true during working life. Many jobs take place in noisy environments, where hearing protection is often necessary, such as airports, factories, or on outdoor sites where noisy equipment like drills is required.

However, there are other jobs that might surprise people with their capacity to cause ear damage. For example, some might think of farming as a quiet life out in the country amid fields of crops or livestock. But often it involves being indoors with heavy machinery, such as milking equipment.

Ambulance drivers are also at risk, because of the noise of sirens, and while a road worker using a big drill may have ear muffs on, a dentist using a smaller one is not, yet is still at risk of suffering damaged hearing as they fix their patients’ teeth.

Musicians can also endure excess sound when they are at a noisy gig, both from their own instruments and the crowd, while professional sports stars will also be at risk from loud crowd noises.

Although some people operating heavy machinery on building sites might have ear protection, others nearby might decide not to use it so that they can engage in conversation with colleagues. This is not the wisest of moves.

Other people working in noisy environments on a regular basis include bouncers and bar staff, while those who work outside as couriers on motorbikes or cycles will get an overload of noise as they navigate the traffic of busy city streets.

Not only can these jobs damage your hearing, but when you finish work and undertake some leisure activities, you can do more harm then.

Some of these might occur by being in the same sort of environment mentioned above, like a noisy bar, gig, or sports stadium. You might enjoy more choice of where you go than a courier if you ride a motorbike or even a pedal bike, but the noise of the former and potential exposure to traffic noise of the latter can still add to the possible harm.

Even gardening can be quite damaging. You might think of wearing earphones when using a chainsaw, but what about when mowing the lawn or using hedge trimmers? It may be surprising how much harm these can do.

Of course, people may still undertake such activities as they get older; you can be a pensioner and still mow your lawn or go to a noisy football match, for instance. But it is in environments that people of working age find themselves most often that a lot of damage can be done, often without them realising it. 

Most people will by now have had at least one Covid-19 infection. While the consequences of these range from being entirely asymptomatic at one end of the spectrum to death and debilitating ‘long Covid’ at the other, there are many possible consequences that are only gradually being understood.

The possibility that hearing loss can be caused by the virus is not something that gets much attention, but it is something you should be concerned about and if you think your hearing has declined after an infection, that is an extra reason to book a free hearing test.

Speaking to the Huffington Post, Dr Amesh Adalja from Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security said there have been many reports of Covid impacting on hearing and it is known that the virus can infect ear cells.

“The concern is that SARS-CoV-2 – or the immune response to it – may damage the cells of the ear responsible for transmitting sound information to the brain,” he added.

Earlier this year, a study published in the US found that among patients who had severe Covid, seven per cent had suffered serious loss and between 12 and 13 per cent had endured mild impairment.

These indicators are, of course, the results of the earliest research and due to the novel nature of Covid when it emerged three years ago there may be a lot more to be discovered about how the virus can affect hearing, along with so many other long-term health effects it can have.

Even so, it is important to keep checking your hearing at any time, so if you have had a Covid infection, as most people have, this can be added to the list.

While the idea that the virus can affect eyesight got plenty of early publicity through Dominic Cummins’ infamous drive to Barnard Castle, it is clearly time that your hearing got some attention too.

Because hearing is one of the five senses, hearing damage and hearing loss can have further-reaching effects that affect the other senses.

Whilst the best and clearest way to determine the scale of hearing loss is through audiology tests, there are other common telltale signs that someone who can hear is struggling more than they may be expecting.

One of the most common and yet most surprising is finding conversations more tiring as you have to exert effort to distinguish between different voices in a crowded area.

However, despite there being anecdotal evidence that listening more closely is more tiring, there had not been any scientific studies that confirmed this for sure until the middle of 2023, when two were published within just a few months of each other.

They found a connection between eye movements and focusing on listening, and what these studies highlighted may help with future hearing treatments.

 

Why Eye Movements?

Both papers, the first written by Claudia Contandini-Wright and her team and the second by M. Eric Cuit and Bjorn Herrman, both for the Journal of Neuroscience, focus on the behaviour of the eyes during “effortful speech listening” or times when someone pays attention to speech whilst listening.

The first paper focuses on pupil dilation, highlighting that when trial subjects were focusing on listening to noises that were difficult to parse, their eyes were noticeably larger, typically reflective with sensory arousal and cognitive processing, such as when someone is memorising information.

The second paper focused instead on the connection between eye movements and listening, with there being a typical connection between slower eye movements and increased focus.

This is, for example, why people blink less often when they are reading, and their eyes will move slower and they will blink less depending on how complex the text they are reading is.

This approach was transposed from reading to listening, with 26 young adults listening to several different sound files featuring both short sentences and longer spoken stories, an eye tracker reading their movements.

The findings revealed several interesting results.

The first was that there was a connection between focused listening and eye movement, highlighting the potential to study this further in auditory neurology, with less of the potential environmental disruptions found when trying to detect pupil size.

This also highlights the potential for tracking eye movements as part of hearing tests, as they can be used to detect difficulties of hearing in practical situations even if your ears have the capacity for hearing as determined through conventional pitch testing.

As this is an exceptionally early field of study, however, it is difficult to determine which eye movements relate to which cognitive hearing processes, which will require more study.

As well as this, whilst more effortful listening can be a symptom of hearing loss, it can also be exceptionally context-sensitive.

People will listen more attentively when processing complex or less clear sentences, as well as any speech in languages they are not necessarily fluent in.

These two papers are the beginning of a fascinating field of study, one that could produce a new approach to examining how people hear.