Your warnings to kids who play their music too loud are wrong, study says

You’re walking on the sidewalk when a teenager with headphones on passes you, and you can clearly hear a loud beat even as they walk several steps away.

Even if you don’t say it, a piece of conventional wisdom might come to mind: Blasting music that loudly is going to damage that teen’s hearing. Except in this case, conventional wisdom would be wrong, according to a new study.

That study, which looked at 7,036 participants ages 12 to 19 years old, found that even though exposure to loud music through headphones had significantly increased between 1988 and 2010, reported hearing loss had not. The study was published in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

“Noise exposure, either prolonged or recent, was not consistently associated with an increased risk of hearing loss across all surveys,” wrote the study’s authors, two medical doctors at the University of California-San Francisco.

Some groups studied had non-significant increases in hearing loss, while other groups had non-significant decreases.

The concern for young people’s hearing is a legitimate one, the authors said, because even mild levels of hearing loss in children and adolescents can affect educational outcomes.

Only two or three of every 1,000 children are born with a noticeable lack of hearing in one or both ears, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. About 2 percent of adults aged 45 to 54 have disabling hearing loss, but the rate increases to 8.5 percent for adults aged 55 to 64. Nearly 25 percent of those aged 65 to 74 and half of those who are 75 and older have disabling hearing loss.

Slowly losing hearing as you age is a condition known as presbycusis, and doctors don’t know exactly why it affects some people more than others, according to NIDCD. But the condition appears to be hereditary, and years of exposure to prolonged loud noise – such as those experienced by construction workers, musicians, airport employees and yard care workers – can be more likely to develop presbycusis.

The findings in the new study are consistent with earlier findings by the NIDCD, which found the amount of adults who reported hearing loss dropped slightly between 1999 and 2012.

About 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from using hearing aids, many of them over the age of 70. But only a third of those who could benefit over age 70 use them, according to NIDCD.

This story was originally published July 31, 2017 at 10:45 AM with the headline "Your warnings to kids who play their music too loud are wrong, study says."