MP3 Players and Your Hearing
Well, it’s holiday shopping season, and no doubt, many parents are going to get requests from their kids for an MP 3 player.
But before you do, you might want to hear about a health warning regarding these devices--hearing being the operative word.
MP3 players don’t have to be a problem. But, because of the way they’re designed, they’re efficiency and ease of use, and the fact they appeal to young people who like to crank up the volume, these devices end up being a set up as a serious long term threat to one’s hearing.
MP3 players are everywhere, and it seems as if everyone plays their players kind of loud.
“Loud enough so I cant hear anyone around me,” says Diago, an MP3 user.
“Pretty loud to drown out the background noise,” says Angie, another MP3 aficionado.
Iris adds, “How loud? Very loud. The people on the train say excuse me can you lower that?”
Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, Director of Pediatric Otolaryngology at Long Island College Hospital says, “We are actually able to measure the actual sound level delivered by the device to a person’s ear drum that is wearing it. If you cranked it up to maximum volume at about a 110 to 120 decibels even a few minutes a day at that problem could over time give you a induced noise hearing loss.”
Noise-induced hearing loss isn’t an immediate problem. The damage creeps up over years.
The issue with MP3 players is actually two fold: the volume of the sound and the time exposed to it. Hearing loss is permanent and additive, which means the longer one listens and the greater the volume, the greater the risk of hearing loss over time.
“There was a recent study in England where they looked at this and found that 85 percent of people that they surveyed turned up the volume regularly to compensate for the trucks and the subway and the noises in the street. We have the ability to place these little ear buds into the ear canal and those are not as good at filtering out the background noise because they don’t always fit snuggly so the reaction is to turn up the volume,” states Dr. Rosenfeld.
And given you can store up to three hundred hours of music on a typical MP3 player and the battery lasts twelve hours, and one can turn it up to 100 decibels, it’s up to the consumer to protect one’s hearing, and use the players safely.
So if this is going to be a present for one’s teenager or twenty-something, it should come with some good parental advice--as a bonus, of course.
“People just need to be aware that they get one set of ears. It is generally safe to listen for an hour a day at 60 percent volume, so a rough guide doing those things should reduce the chance of any hearing problems,” says Dr. Rosenfeld.
It’s estimated that around 16 percent of children between 6 and 19 already have signs of noise induced hearing loss.
Dr. Rosenfeld says if someone starts to notice ringing in their ears or trouble hearing or understanding things when there is background noise or having trouble hearing high pitched tones, that could be a sign of noise induced hearing loss.
Go to an ENT specialist, or otolaryngologist.
Related Stories Links:
|