Smoking And Obesity Can Make You Deaf
Tuesday June 10, 2008

Smoking or being overweight can lead to loss of hearing, according to new research.

High BMI linked to hearing lossExperts found a link between how much somebody smokes and for how long, and their chances of suffering deafness.

People with a higher body mass index (BMI) were also more likely to suffer hearing loss, the study found.

A total of 4,083 men and women between the ages of 53 and 67 were recruited from across seven European countries, including Germany, Belgium and the UK.

Exposure to noise in the workplace was by far the "most significant and consistently replicated risk factor," the researchers said.

But they also found a "significant association" between how much somebody smoked and for how many years, and high-frequency hearing loss.

Erik Fransen, doctor of biomedical sciences at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and lead author on the paper, said it was difficult to say how much higher risk people had of suffering hearing loss if they smoked or were overweight.

But he said the association was linear - with higher BMIs and more smoking leading to greater hearing loss.

"The hearing loss is proportional to how much you smoke and your BMI," he said.

"There's a greater increase in risk as BMI increases and smoking increases."

The study, which was carried out with funding from the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, was published in the Journal of the Association for Research into Otolaryngology.