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Essay about Industrial Noise and its Effects on Hearing

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Industrial Noise and its Effects on Hearing

Audition plays many important roles in our daily lives. From sound, we can identify and locate an object. Also, spoken language and its auditory reception have become an extremely important means of communication. A deficit in the ability to hear have tremendous effects on a person physically and mentally. Hearing loss caused by occupational noise is one of our biggest industrial diseases. It is a disease that has been recognized since the Industrial Revolution. According to Sataloff and Sataloff (1987) about 35 million Americans suffer from hearing loss, and of those, eight million suffer from occupational hearing loss. Because of the sheer number of people and our neglect of the subject, …show more content…

The second is a noise-induced temporary threshold shift that results in an elevation of heighten levels following noise exposure. The loss is usually reversible. The third effect is a noise-induced permanent threshold shift, which is not reversible. It may come from acoustic trauma or be produced by the cumulative effect of repeated noise exposures over many periods of years.

The structures most susceptible to noise damage are the sensory receptor cells, the hair cells, located in the cochlea. Damage from repeated noise is a physiochemical problem where the metabolic stress exerts pressure on the maximally stimulated cells. Depending on the amount of cellular damage, it could be permanent or temporary damage. In fact, cochlear damage is the number-one characteristic of occupational hearing loss. Sataloff and Sataloff (1987) namea few others. For one,the patient must have a history of long-term exposure to intense noise levels sufficient to cause the degree and pattern of hearing loss evident in audiologic finding. The hearing loss must have developed gradually over a period of years. The hearing loss must have developed during the first eight to ten years of exposure. The hearing loss must initially have started in the higher frequencies (generally 3000-6000 Hz) and be almost equal in both ears. Speech discrimination scores, even with

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