Do you wear headphones or earbuds? Are you concerned at all about their effect on your hearing? Maybe somewhere in the back of your mind you remember that they're bad?
Well, despite recent fears over increased headphone use, not to mention loud concerts and movies, not to mention urban life and honking and who knows what else, hearing loss is actually declining in the U.S.
As the New York Times, reports, "The paper, published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, which periodically administers health tests to a representative sample of the population. The investigators ... compared data collected between 1999 and 2004 with data from 2011 and 2012, the most recent available."
What's impressive is not only did hearing loss decrease from 15.9% of the population to 14.1% in less than a decade - that's 5 million people fewer - but that this is part of a continuing trend since the 1950s.
