Issue date: 7/11/07 Section: News

With smoking bans being put in place throughout the country, researchers have found another reason why they could have a positive effect on members of those communities. Studies done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other institutions worldwide have found that smokers have a 70 percent greater risk of having hearing loss than non-smokers.

Deborah Pitcher, doctor of audiology and owner of Bloomington-Normal Audiology, said when the studies were done, researchers tried to pull out other variants, such as people who have been exposed to loud noise, in order to make the connection. "The conclusions are all the same, and that is when people smoke cigarettes, they run the risk of having a much higher chance of having hearing loss," Pitcher said.

"The interesting thing that I found in these studies is that a lot of this happens in the early years of cigarette smoking. If you look at people who are less than 35 years of age, about four and a half percent of those people in the overall general population will have some hearing loss. If they smoked, it went up to 43 percent, which is a huge difference. If you look at people over 35 years of age, about 10 and a half percent of them will have hearing loss. If they smoke, they increase that chance by 17 percent," she continued.

According to Pitcher, the studies do not give a clear reason about why cigarette smoking would cause hearing loss, but she said the generally accepted thought is that nicotine is a vasodilator."This means that it is restricting blood flow. The inner ear system needs to get blood supply and oxygen supply. If it is denied that or is not getting it in sufficient quantity, which is what we believe happens with nicotine, the inner ear is not getting necessary nutrients. That results in damage of the delicate hair cells and is permanent loss," Pitcher explained. According to Joseph Smaldino, chairperson for the department of communication sciences and disorders at ISU, a previous student of his at the University of Northern Iowa conducted some similar research about six years ago. "There is a measure of the ear's health called otoacoustic emissions. What we found is that people who smoke a lot had smaller otoacoustic emissions, which would indicate that their ears maybe weren't operating at full efficiency," Smaldino said."We looked at people who smoked something like two packs a day versus people who smoked less than a half a pack a day. Our conclusion was that because these people smoke a lot, they have less oxygen in their blood. That lack of oxygen is what causes the hair cells not to operate well and would result in a hearing loss." Generally, the first nerve endings to be damaged are those responsible for high, shrill sounds, and it turns into a domino effect, as people do not realize they are having a problem until it is too late. "We don't really use that portion of our hearing unless we are musicians or have a job that requires us to respond to a real high sound," Pitcher said.

"By the time they realize it, the damage has now invaded important frequency areas for speech. These people then start having difficulty distinguishing between whether somebody said seven or 11. They start misunderstanding things because they don't have those sounds coming through clearly."

The studies suggest that, while there may be permanent damage, stopping and getting the nutrients back can stop the problem from getting worse. "However, for those people who also were exposed to loud noise, there was a synergistic effect. They had an even higher incidence of hearing loss," Pitcher said.

In the study that Karen Cruickshanks did in Wisconsin, they looked at non-smokers who lived with a smoker. According to Pitcher, they did find a greater increase in hearing loss in those folks as well.

"All of this is just more ammunition as to why smoking is not good for you," she concluded.

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