Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and today we’re going to be talking about all about protecting your hearing. What are some of the ways we can protect our hearing and what happens when we’re exposed to a lot of noise. Before we jump in, I’d like to remind you that you can download the FREE Five Step Guide to Navigating Your Child’s Hearing Loss over on my website.

In my work as an educational audiologist, I saw that one of the biggest problems was trying to stay on top of all the overwhelming questions that come up when someone’s child gets a diagnosis. There are so many questions and all different things that need to get done and having a five-step guide that takes you through it has helped a lot of you. I’m really grateful for the feedback I’ve gotten on it and I hope that it continues to help more people. You can download it for free at allaboutaudiology.com/guide and you can also send that guide over to someone you know who might benefit from it. Someone you know who has a new or recent diagnosis of a hearing loss in their family and it’s a really useful tool for helping to navigate and figure out what are the next steps and that’s over at allaboutaudiology.com/guide.

And now, on to today’s topic.

What are some of the causes of hearing loss?

We know that hearing loss can be hereditary or genetic. It can be present from birth or it can be something that happens or develops during life that can be acquired. In general when it comes to hearing loss, there isn’t a lot we can control. But there is one cause of hearing loss that we might have some control over and that’s noise induced hearing loss, hearing loss that’s caused by being exposed to very loud sounds. When it comes to noise exposure, we always talk about dose. And when we talk about dose, we talk about two things: how loud the sound is and that’s measured in decibels, in db, and how long, what’s the duration of the noise exposure.

It can be complicated to measure the amount of noise exposure and when we put it into this measurement of dose, we can get the average decibel level over a certain amount of time. So for example, the OSHA recommendations for occupational safety for work standards, are 85 Db for 8 hours. If someone is exposed to 85 Db for eight hours, then at that point there needs to be hearing protection, there needs to be monitoring of the hearing, hearing tests and so on. So when we think about our exposure to noise, we can think about the dosage and think about trying to reduce: a, how loud the sounds are that we are exposed to and b, how long we are getting exposed to them for.

So for example, the other day on Instagram, someone sent me a message and asked me, “I’m going to the dentist and I’m actually a little worried. There’s all these loud drills and is that going to affect my hearing?” I responded to them by saying, “That was a great question. The drills are pretty loud and are very close to your ears and your face, so that’s a wonderful question to ask, but if you are going to the dentist once a year for half an hour and you are exposed to that sound, it’s not likely to have such a significant effect on your hearing. And also because it’s such a short amount of time, your ears and hair cells have a chance to recuperate.