Julie Raney is a certified and licensed audiologist. She has a B.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders and a Master’s Degree in Audiology from Idaho State University. She has worked as a clinical audiologist in Colorado since 2005. She specializes in hearing amplification for adults and delivers her services in both English and Sign Language.

The Study

Doctors Harrison W. Lin, Hossein Mahboubi, and Neil Bhattacharyya at the University of California Irvine and Harvard Medical School recently conducted a study using “big data” to learn about the patterns of hearing loss and injury. The dataset they used was enormous: The National Health Interview Survey.

This study asked a battery of questions to 232.2 million individuals 18 years or older from 2007 to 2015. With this rich and extensive data set in hand, health researchers with all kinds of questions are about to determine the relationship between seemingly unrelated variables. Only at the level of such a large population can some of these relationships become evident. These authors were curious to know about the relationship between hearing loss and injury, so they used responses from people who had an accidental injury in the last 3 months and self-reported levels of hearing ability.

Respondents answered if their hearing was “excellent,” “good,” “a little trouble,” “moderate trouble,” “a lot of trouble,” and “deaf.” The researchers were also interested in relationships with types of injuries related to driving, work, and leisure/sports.

The Results

Their findings were striking at each step of the study. First, they noted that out of all those who had injuries, one 1 in 6 said that their hearing was less than “excellent” or “good,” but we know that a high proportion of people in the general population do have hearing loss of some kind.

The results became more significant at more severe degrees of hearing loss. For instance, those who reported having “a lot of trouble” hearing were twice as likely to have had an accidental injury. When it came to the different categories of accidental injuries, both work-related and leisure-related injuries were more common among people with hearing loss than those without hearing loss.

With these results, the authors were curious to know more about the scenarios connecting hearing loss to accidental injury.

The Implications

Beyond the situations that have a clear relationship between hearing loss and injury, these numbers are just too high to explain the entire story. Perhaps some of the other cases have to do with our reliance on hearing to orient to the world spatially.

Although this relationship happens unconsciously, we use hearing to get a sense of space due to sound reflection, reverberation, and echo. Even while moving through a room with furniture it can be helpful to hear sound bouncing off of objects to be able to avoid them.

With such an extensive relationship between hearing and spatial orientation, it is possible that hearing loss is leading to other types of injuries, beyond those in which a person missed a warning shout or alarm.

If you have hearing loss, these results also remind us that it is important to get a hearing test to know just how severe it has become. Those with mild hearing loss had much less likelihood of accidental injury than those with serious trouble hearing, so a hearing test is the best way to know if you are at a higher risk. Contact us today to set up a hearing test if you have not had one recently, as hearing ability can change quite rapidly.