Even 50 years after the U.S. surgeon General’s warning about the dangers of cigarettes, it’s still not uncommon to walk down a street and see quite a few people smoking. In Canada, about 1 in 10 people is a smoker. There’s been more and more research on the health hazards of smoking and they go beyond the effect it can have on one’s lungs.
Cigarette smoke has also been linked to poor hearing. That may sound odd but, when you stop to think about, the connection makes a lot of sense. In addition to entering the lungs, the chemicals inhaled while smoking also make their way into the bloodstream that feeds all parts of the body, including the inner ear mechanisms that transmit sound data to the brain.
The most prominent example of the connection between smoking and hearing loss has to do with nicotine, probably the most well-known component of cigarette smoke. Nicotine is one of a number of “ototoxic” chemicals; “ototoxic” is a term that literally means “poisonous to the ear.”
Nicotine causes its harm by reducing blood flow to the cochlea, an organ located in the inner ear; the cochlea contains mechanisms for sending electrical impulses to the brain, where they are recognized as sound. Damage to the internal workings of the cochlea can lead to both hearing loss and tinnitus, the phantom sensation of persistent ringing or buzzing in the ear.
Odd though it might seem to try connecting hearing loss and smoking, statistics don’t lie. Smokers are 70% more likely than non-smokers to develop hearing loss. And people who live with smokers are 28% more likely to develop hearing loss than others who don’t regularly find themselves exposed to cigarette smoke.
The effects of smoking on hearing health don’t stop at the sensorineural problems of nicotine can cause for the cochlea. on the cochlea. Smoking has also been found to affect the conductive aspect of hearing by causing problems for middle ear mechanisms such as the eardrum and ossicle bones.
If you’re a smoker or have smokers among your family and friends, we can’t recommend strongly enough that you get yourself and/or your loved ones to a qualified hearing health professional. The sooner you know about smoking-related hearing loss, the better—and a comprehensive hearing evaluation is the only way to be certain of whether or not this slow-developing type of hearing loss is happening.
