By Frank James,Chicago Tribune
Experts suspect portable devices to blame for rise in hearing loss

WASHINGTON – A disturbing number of high-school students and adults are reporting early signs of hearing loss, and hearing experts think they know the culprits: iPods and similar portable devices that allow people to funnel loud sounds into their ears for hours on end.

More research is needed to conclusively establish the link between the white cords dangling from millions of ears and hearing difficulties. But scientists suspect the increasing prevalence of the devices is contributing to the rising number of people reporting some form of hearing loss.

Fears and debates about the loud music favored by youths have been around since the dawn of rock ‘n roll, of course, from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, Black Sabbath to Nirvana.

But the leaps in technology that are allowing commuters on a bus or kids walking to high school to feel like they’re at a deafening concert are also channeling ever higher volumes of music more directly, and longer, onto people’s eardrums.

Hearing experts who called a news conference here Tuesday to voice their fears didn’t use the words “crisis” or “epidemic,” but it was clear they were worried about the results of a survey conducted by the polling firm Zogby International.

Twenty-eight percent of high school students questioned said they had to turn up the volume on a TV or radio to hear it better, for example, and 29 percent of the teenagers said they often found themselves saying, “What?” and “Huh?” during normal conversation.

Though that may sound like ordinary behavior for some teenagers, audiologists are taking it seriously, especially since the adult percentages weren’t much lower.

“The results should give pause to anyone who’s concerned about the nation’s hearing health,” said Alex Johnson, president of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, based in Rockville, Md.

“While the cause of the symptoms was not identified, the polling showed that people are listening louder and longer – habits made easier by strides in listening technology, but ones that may also contribute to hearing damage,” said Johnson, chairman of the audiology and speech-language pathology department at Wayne State University.

The polling results and warnings mirror concerns voiced by other hearing experts in recent years. These experts estimate that more than 28 million Americans have some hearing loss, a figure that some think will reach 80 million in 25 years as the baby boom generation ages.

Johnson and others suggested that consumers take precautions, including parents monitoring the volume of the music as well as how long their children listen to it.

The experts also recommended that consumers buy the often pricey headphones that block out external sounds like subway or airplane noise, the idea being that consumers then wouldn’t need to crank up the volume to overcome the background noise.

And they suggested that manufacturers limit the volume on their products. Dean Garstecki, a communication sciences and medical professor at Northwestern, said, “I think companies who produce these products have an obligation to limit the output of the devices to a level that does not cause hearing loss.” He noted that hearing-aid makers do as much in order to prevent causing additional hearing loss.

If manufacturers of the portable devices do not act voluntarily, Garstecki suggested the U.S. government could follow the French example. France set a 100-decibel limit on the sound iPods and other devices could produce, but there is no such limit in the U.S. Apple Computer Inc., iPod’s maker, temporarily removed the devices from French store shelves to update the software to meet the legal restriction, according to a lawsuit filed against Apple by a Louisiana man who claimed that an iPod damaged his hearing.

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said he had no comment on the Zogby poll results.

The two lawmakers who appeared at Tuesday’s news conference – Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-N.J. – did not seem intent on a legislative fix.

Seeming to wax nostalgic, Ferguson said, “Listening to music that annoys parents at incredibly high volumes is a rite of passage for kids of any generation.” But he put much of the onus on parents. “As parents, we talk to our kids about looking both ways before crossing the street,” he said. “We talk to our kids about not talking to strangers. We also need to talk with them about the lifelong damage that could be caused by misusing personal music devices.”

Markey said he plans to work with Ferguson in a bipartisan way to press the National Institutes of Health and industry for more research on the role portable media devices play in hearing loss and solutions.

“We need to make sure that when millions of consumers are plugging up their ears to travel to work or work out they are not unknowingly taking on too much for their ears to handle,” Markey said.

The experts also warned that no one should take hearing loss lightly, that it can have major consequences, even when it’s only minimal and particularly when it occurs in children.

Anne Marie Tharpe, a hearing and speech sciences professor at Vanderbilt University, said research she participated in indicated children with such deficits were “failing in school at a rate of 10 times their peers.

“My point is that minimal hearing loss is not inconsequential for these children,” she said.

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