When smokers don't want to hear
Now there's another reason not to smoke: Cigarette use can damage your hearing. Smokers are almost twice as likely as nonsmokers to have hearing loss with aging. Most of the studies conducted in the past on the link between smoking and hearing loss have produced inconclusive results. They either concentrated only on older people, whose hearing is already generally declining, or too few participants were examined. In the late 1980s, Karen Cruickshanks and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Medical School at Beaver Dam began a study involving 4,500 elderly and middle-aged participants. They wanted to find a link between vision loss and smoking. Because their study group was larger than the previous groups, they decided to also study hearing loss.
The researchers tested the hearing ability of 3753 subjects. They had participants fill out questionnaires about smoking habits and medical histories related to their hearing ability. After the researchers accounted for risk factors such as noise exposure and cardiovascular disease, they found that anyone who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes was at least 1.7 times more likely than a non-smoker to have significant hearing loss (Journal of the American Medical Association of 3 June 1998, abstract). In addition, heavy smokers were the most likely to experience hearing loss.
"This is a very important study," says George Gates, an auditory researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. The study, he notes, is compelling because it includes a large number of people of different ages. 'Noise is still the dominant factor in hearing loss, but as a result of this study we need to add smoking to the list,' explained the scientist.
Cruickshanks says it's not clear how smoking could lead to hearing loss. However, the two most commonly held beliefs are that smoking causes oxidative damage to ear tissues or restricts blood flow to ear tissues.
