Teens and young adults are at risk of hearing loss throughout their lives. The culprit? Earbuds

NINA MOINI: The World Health Organization says more than 1 billion teens and young adults are at risk of permanent hearing loss due to unsafe listening practices. Those unsafe habits, they're rooted in the headphones and earbuds many of us use daily. Peggy Nelson is an audiology professor at University of Minnesota. She's here now to explain.

Professor Nelson, thank you for being here.

PEGGY NELSON: Hi, Nina. Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: Of course. I think about this a lot given my line of work with headphones on and listening to audio all day. But when we think about safety, when it comes to sound, we might think of people in those professions or people who work around really loud machinery. But are their day-to-day risks to our hearing that we might not even be thinking about?

PEGGY NELSON: Well, that's it's a great question. And we keep studying that question. Certainly, the people who are the most at risk have those noisy jobs that you were mentioning or perhaps they serve in the military or they're in a factory. But all of us should be thinking about it.

Maybe one of the loudest rooms I've ever been in was when the Lynx won their championship game.

[NINA LAUGHS]

And it was so much fun to be there and the energy is there, but we do need to worry about our hearing when we're in those loud environments, yes.

NINA MOINI: Do you think like those kind of one-off moments can actually have a pretty significant impact?

PEGGY NELSON: They can. It's really dependent. Each of us is highly different from the next person. Maybe you've noticed that.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

PEGGY NELSON: Some of us are much more susceptible to that noise damage than others. And we haven't quite figured that out, who's going to be the more susceptible and who's going to have tougher ears. So we all just need to be careful about those loud environments.

And perhaps you all have an app installed on your phone that can help check for that you're in a risky environment and you can have earplugs on hand and pop them in during those times.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and if you think about the past couple decades, you know, maybe 20 years ago people didn't have this 24/7 access to devices that are just playing constantly-- podcasts, shows. But now the vast majority of people use earbuds. So, has that changed the way we hear?

PEGGY NELSON: You know, we're studying that. And the preliminary evidence, the early evidence is that we're not damaging more than a generation before us. We're not.

Even though we have earbuds in our ears more often, the levels aren't such that they are instantaneously damaging or that they are noticeably damaging over a short period of time. So, so far, we seem to be maintaining our hearing fairly well in spite of using earbuds. Now, that doesn't say-- I remember that one billion number that the World Health Organization says are at risk. And that's a pretty scary number.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

PEGGY NELSON: Those are at risk when we wear them. But many of us are going to be tougher than that, going to be not so susceptible to damage. So we can be careful without being overly alarmed by the risk.

NINA MOINI: Are you able to sort of compare, I guess, the damage or the impact of volume versus how often we're around noise?

PEGGY NELSON: That's exactly what we study, how long it lasts and how loud it is. And in fact, our governing agencies, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has, you can listen to 90 DBs for eight hours. But if it goes over 90 DB, you have to cut the time essentially in half for every five DB. So by the time we listen to 95 or 100 DB, and I'm sure the Lynx game was 100 DB, we should be listening to that for less than an hour. And we call that our dose.

We've had our dose of noise for the day, so we should keep in mind how loud it is and how long we're listening to it.

NINA MOINI: What about the feature of noise canceling earbuds. Is that helpful? Is that hurtful?

PEGGY NELSON: Noise canceling can really help us when we're, say, our phone rings in our earbuds and we've got noise in the environment, it'll help cut down the background noise and focus on the voice that we want to hear. And those are getting better and better. But many of us, when we have our earbuds in, are listening to music, and so we don't have noise canceling on. We like it full. You know, we want to hear the full experience.

So we tend to not have that on. And that's what we want, we want a rich musical experience from that. We want to enjoy that, so we don't want to turn that down too much. But I would just say let's keep it short and give ourselves a break between listening efforts so that we can let our ears recover a little bit between exposures.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and sometimes even like in iPhones or some technology, it sort of gives you that nudge, right, to say maybe you've exceeded your limit. So are there ways technology is sort of catching up to this problem and helping us with hearing loss?

PEGGY NELSON: They are. The companies are very interested in having us maintain our hearing and to be safe while listening. So we do get warnings that if we turn it up any farther, we're in the red zone. You know, we might be walking through the airport or something and everything's so loud and we're trying to have a phone conversation. It just may not be possible at those loud levels.

So I would pay attention to the warnings that are on our technology. Cut off that conversation. Wait till you're in a quieter room and then resume your conversation or you're listening to music when you can have it at a more comfortable listening level. It also just sounds better.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and you touched a little bit on maybe genetics, family history. Is this something where say you have a parent who is in their 60s and they're needing hearing aids. Is that something that you should look to to be like oh my gosh, well, I better take care of myself. Or is there a connection there?

PEGGY NELSON: Yes, there absolutely is. We don't know it directly yet, so we can't do genetic testing for this. But we do know that there are people who are much more susceptible than others, and that does tend to run in families and in closely related groups. So I would recommend paying attention to your parents and grandparents, figuring out if they do have hearing loss, and being extra careful if they do and using earplugs as often as you can, knowing that you want to protect your hearing.

We all want to communicate and enjoy music well into our 90s, right? So we really should be paying attention to those generations before us, yes.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and people are living longer, you know?

PEGGY NELSON: We do. That's right.

NINA MOINI: This might be more--

PEGGY NELSON: And hearing--

NINA MOINI: Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead?

PEGGY NELSON: --one another is so important for our social interactions. It's so important for maintaining our relationships with our families. We really want to maintain our hearing in order to have those rich relationships and experiences well into our 100th year. Let's aim for that.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely. And this might be a little more psychological or social kind of what you're talking about, but do you find that people are really hesitant to come to terms with hearing loss. Or are you feeling any stigma or anything around that is kind of changing? I find that some people feel like, oh man, this means I'm getting old, you know?

PEGGY NELSON: We do say that to ourselves, don't we, in everything that we-- yes, we still see the stigma around hearing aids. I'm hoping that that's changing.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

PEGGY NELSON: I wear earbuds and have been wearing earbuds to listen to music for, you know, 10 years or more. And so I'm hoping that people like me, as we get into our 60s, 70s, 80s are saying, OK, it's just another device on our ear. It's similar to those earphones I used to wear, and I'd be more willing to use this.

The quality of hearing aids now is getting better and better all the time. You can stream information straight from your phone to your hearing aids or straight from your iPad or your television to your hearing aids. So they're actually really very functional, very helpful in day-to-day living. I just hope we can get rid of some of that aging stigma.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and they seem to be more like dainty and a lot of times you can't even see them.

PEGGY NELSON: I think they're cute.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, they are cute. Why not? Another accessory.

PEGGY NELSON: Right.

NINA MOINI: So can you explain-- I found this fascinating. The producers were telling me about this before we talked to you. Can you explain what's going on physiologically when we have hearing loss over time, what that looks like?

PEGGY NELSON: For most of us, the inner ear is a really complex working system where there's fluids that are moving and then there are hair cells, stereocilia that are connecting the system together and making the auditory nerve fire. And that's what we need, the signals sent to the brain by these stereocilia connecting them. And as we overstimulate the inner ear, as we're too loud for too long, we just wear those stereocilia down. And especially for the high pitches, the high frequencies, they're more vulnerable.

And so we get a high frequency hearing loss because those connections are no longer made. So if I go to the Lynx game once or twice and I don't have my earplugs with me, I might get a temporary sense that, oh, after I come out, my ears are ringing a little bit. It's a little bit dull. Those hair cells are still kind of recovering from that over stimulation.

But if I do that too often, they can't recover. Then, it will become a more permanent kind of change and that damage to the stereocilia will be permanent. We can't change that.

NINA MOINI: And just before we go, can you give just what's your first word of advice to people who are concerned about their hearing. What should they do?

PEGGY NELSON: They should be careful. I always have earplugs with me. They're really all different sizes and styles. So find some that you would really wear and just keep them with you when you go places. And if we go to public places like Target Center, there are earplugs available for free. They provide them for free there.

And then I would get checked from an audiologist regularly. I would just go for a baseline before you're worried about it. The sooner we know, the better we can treat a mild hearing loss and keep the brain informed with all of the sensation of hearing that we can possibly give. We don't want to lose that because we do think hearing loss can be related to some slowing of our cognitive ability. And we want to keep that at its maximum.

So I'd go sooner, go talk with a professional sooner than you think you might need it. And I'd keep some earplugs handy.

NINA MOINI: Professor, that was so helpful. Thank you so much for your time.

PEGGY NELSON: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: That was University of Minnesota audiology professor, Peggy Nelson.