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If you like pumping up the volume on your MP3 player, then get your ears checked before it is too late
In a swanky new Orchard Road mall where the young, restless and fashionable mill around, shoppers can browse through the latest apparel, fill up at chic eateries... and get their hearing checked.
Bay Audio hearing-aid company’s opening of a shop at 313@Somerset is not as incongruous as it may first appear.
A sales assistant at the outlet says: “We want to make the concept of using hearing aids more hip, which is why we chose our newest location to be in town. People can walk in for free hearing trials.”
It is more than about sprucing up the image of people using hearing aids. The 10-minute test, which plays different tones and pitches at different frequencies to diagnose hearing loss, may well be necessary for people younger than an age normally associated with hearing loss.
A study that associate professor Lynne Lim, director of the Centre for Hearing Intervention and Language Development at the National University Hospital, conducted on a group of 30 medical students showed that 20 per cent of them had mild hearing loss, which they did not even suspect.
“It is very easy to miss hearing loss, especially in mild to moderate cases, if no proper hearing test is taken,” she explains.
General manager of hearing-aid company Beltone Singapore, Mr Winston Oh, 42, notes a 15 per cent increase in the number of teenagers and young adults with hearing problems.
He says: “The most common cause of hearing loss is presbycusis, an age-related hearing problem that progressively reduces one’s ability to hear.
“For younger people, genetic reasons and environmental exposure such as industrial machinery or very loud music do contribute significantly to an early onset of presbycusis.”
His observation tallies with the findings of two final-year biomedical engineering and informatics students from Temasek Engineering School. Last year, they surveyed 150 young people aged 16 to 25 to find out the effects of the use of MP3 players on hearing, based on the frequency of usage, operating loudness and listening habits.
The study concluded that “users who are exposed to excessive loud music through use of mobile personal music players have poorer hearing compared to those less exposed”.
Such a conclusion may seem obvious, but it is not so to many people. After taking Bay Audio’s quick hearing test, undergraduate Shaun Phua, 22, was shocked to realise that he had mild hearing loss in his right ear.
“If I hadn’t gone in because I was curious about the shop, I don’t think I would have found out. I guess it’s because I listen to music on my iPod at a loud volume,” says Mr Phua, who intends to go for a follow-up consultation at the shop next month.
Mr Christopher Chan, 44, general manager of Kind Hearing, a hearing-aid company which opened at The Heeren Shops in September last year, says younger people such as Mr Phua do not want to be associated with hearing loss. That is why it is important to improve the image of hearing-aid shops, he says.
“Hearing-aid clinics have always been obscure and do not look very inviting. Some look like caves and younger people would not want to be seen going in there,” he says.
Audiologists whom LifeStyle spoke to agree that hearing loss is not apparent until it becomes more severe in five to 10 years, by which time noise-induced hearing loss is irreversible and cannot be treated by medication or surgery.
Managing director and senior consultant audiologist Steven Lee of hearing-aid company Widex says: “Typically, a 15-minute exposure to noise at 100 decibels is sufficient to result in hearing loss.”
According to Prof Lim, listening to an MP3 player at full blast is equivalent to about 100 decibels of noise.
She says: “Most likely, younger people with hearing loss will start to notice their high-frequency hearing loss only about 10 years from now when they are not as young and their love of loud music has taken its toll. Listen loud now, pay hard later.”
Diseases such as diabetes and hypertension can also aggravate hearing loss since they compromise blood circulation, she adds.
While student Chloe Chan believes that her hearing is “perfect”, the 19-year-old feels that free hearing tests are a good way to create awareness about the problem among younger people.
She says: “Our hearing is ignored because we can just turn up the volume for our music or television programmes. If there can be optical shops, why not hearing-aid shops?”
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