Take Care of Your Hearing

From morning's first echo of percolating coffee to evening's final chat with friends, our hearing connects us to our surroundings. By our late 40s, however, many of us join 30 million other Americans in asking, "Could you speak up?"

People at increasingly younger ages are complaining of hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).

Luckily, however, we can often prevent hearing loss. Two types of problems can interfere with hearing:

• Conductive hearing loss can occur at any age from injury, illness or trauma to the middle or outer ear.

• Sensorineural hearing loss, more common, stems from damage to the inner ear. Sometimes it results from illness or sudden loud noise. Most often, it results from long-term exposure to loud noises.

Noise-induced hearing loss is the top cause of hearing impairment in middle age. In the inner ear, 24,000 sensory hair cells that transfer sound to nerves suffer repeated tiny injuries and don't regenerate. The ear can't translate sounds, especially high-pitched tones.

With antibiotics, we have done away with many infections that used to cause hearing loss. Now doctors are seeing hearing loss from too much noise. Your hearing may be impaired if you think people are mumbling more than they used to, for example.

The simplest way to protect your hearing is to avoid loud noises:

• Avoid or limit the use of headphones attached to disc players, ipods or other music devices.  Even if the volume is kept relatively low, the prolonged exposure to noise can and will damage hearing. Audiologists have already seen an increase in neurosensory damage in younger people.

• Wear earplugs or muff-type noise suppressors if you will be around loud sounds.

• Wear noise-canceling headphones on long jet flights or when exposure to loud noise will be continuous.

Other advice:

• See a doctor if you have ringing in your ears.

• Spend 20 minutes or longer in silence daily: Ears suffer fatigue.

• If work or recreation involves loud noises, get a hearing test annually.

The rule of thumb is: If the noise level is too loud to comfortably carry on a conversation, it's loud enough to pose a risk to your hearing.