Hear Today, Gone Tomorrow: An Assessment of Portable Entertainment Player Use and Hearing Acuity in a Community Sample

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Figure 1.
Number of participants not responding to tones in the right ear. Bars represent the number of males and females missing a tone at either 25 dB hearing level (HL) (typically heard by adults, top) or 40 dB HL (used to screen for mild hearing loss) at 1 of 4 frequencies found commonly in speech for undergraduate students (U; n = 40), graduate students (G; n = 37), and faculty/staff (F/S; n = 17). χ² tests were performed for comparisons within gender groups by academic status. *P < .05 for comparisons between academic levels; †P < .07 for comparisons between genders.

Table 1.

Percent of Subjects Within Each Academic Level Indicating Risk Factors for Noise Induced Hearing Loss According to Gender (n = 94)

Risk factors for NIHL	Male (%)			Female (%)
Risk factors for NIHL	Undergraduate	Graduate	Faculty/Staff	Undergraduate	Graduate	Faculty/Staff
Subjects that reported listening to devices for more than 4 hours/day^*	39	40	18	18	18	50
Users of any type of headphones^*	91	85	55	94	94	50
Subjects that reported listening at "somewhat loud" or "very loud" volume levels^*	70	45	27	35	24	17
Reported at least 1 symptom of hearing loss	30	50	36	35	29	50
Subjects were not concerned that entertainment devices could cause damage	22	10	9	18	18	0
Subjects that have not heard of NIHL	23	40	18	6	31	17
Subjects that believe NIHL is reversible^†	27	5	0	0	3	1

NIHL, noise-induced hearing loss.
* P < .05 for comparisons of responses from each academic level for both genders.
† P < .05 for comparisons of responses from each academic level for males only.