From the BBC:
Passive smoking nearly doubles a teenager's risk of hearing loss, research reveals.
Investigators say the findings, from a study of over 1,500 US teens aged 12 to 19, suggest that secondhand tobacco smoke directly damages young ears. And the greater the exposure the greater the damage. Often it was enough to impair a teen's ability to understand speech, Archives of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery reports.
It is still unclear how much exposure could be harmful and when the damage might occur. Experts already know that smoke increases the risk of middle ear infections. And they believe it may also harm the delicate blood supply to the ear causing "subtle yet serious" changes. For these reasons, as well as other smoke-related health risks, they say the best advice is to avoid any exposure to tobacco smoke as far as is feasible.
I suppose this is a gift to teenagers who ignore their parents though, 21% of them will have a Right-On excuse.
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3 hours ago
12 comments:
Be interesting to know how many of those American teenagers also owned an MP3 player?
I tend to text them anyways, even when we are both in the house.
BB, S, I'm sorry, but could you speak up a bit? My parents smoked in the house when I was a small child.
I also heard from our state broadcaster this morning (I think it was this morning and it might have been a different radio station) that smoking causes Alzheimers.
I agree with Bill, it was the Walkman wot dunnit - together with the infernal incessant racket eminating from speakers in every shop and mall in the land.
If you go back to the source, it's not clear if or how they excluded other factors. Typically, the BBC doesn't go into that.
Smoke exposure was measured by serum cotinine levels, but cotinine levels may be affected by other factors such as race, oddly enough.
Second-hand smoke in childhood is lethal. 100% of children subjected to second-hand smoke in childhood die later in life.
"Passive smoking nearly doubles a teenager's risk of hearing loss, research reveals."
One would be interested if this doubles the risk from 0.0000001% to 0.0000002%, or from 25% to 50%, by the time the teenager ceases to be a teenager at the age of 20.
VFTS, AE, AKH, B, PJH, seriously, you're going to have to speak up a bit. All I can hear is mumbling.
I also have a research result to announce. I have found almost perfect correlation between people being offered research money to make up new harmful effects from smoking, and those people announcing new harmful effects from smoking. Will the BBC cover this one?
BBC report says "around 40% of the 800 teens who had been exposed to secondhand smoke had detectable hearing problems, compared to about 25% of the 750 teens who had not had this exposure.
Yet very few - less than a fifth - of the affected teenagers were aware that they had a problem with their hearing."
This looks to me like another useless political report. They seem to have taken no account of the possibility that (A) kids who spend a lot of time in smoky discos may be getting a larger than average amount of loud noise, which certainly does affect hearing & (B) the "researchers" look like they are influenceing the kids perception of wheteher they have a hearing problem ("Johnny you say you have friends who smoke - leats check your hearing again).
Such scare stories may help sell papers, or in the BBC's case, scare stories which necessitate more government controls, but they are not scientific unless independently verified with a larger population sample and rigorous boundary conditions.
This is why so much social "science" misuses the name.
Ah, so those MP3 earphones are actually ear protectors
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