14 DAY TRIAL // From the long list of potential dangers that mobile phones could bring to its frequent users, here comes another one. Cellulars are a strong potential threat to their user's hearing. Old news, perhaps, but there's a new research to prove it.
The annual meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery in Washington was the place where Naresh K. Panda, MS, DNB, chairman of the department of ear, nose and throat at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, in India made public the results of his study. He conducted a research during a period longer than four years on 100 people, aged 18 to 45, who had used mobile phones for at least a year at an increased frequency.
The result of this recent study is stunning. It looks like those who talk more than an hour daily on the cellular are mostly prone to experience these high-frequency losses. The subjects had problems in hearing consonants such as s, f, t and z at various extents. This made it harder to understand words.
Mobile phone users had various symptoms hinting towards their hearing loss predisposition. This included a warm sensation, fullness in the ears, or ringing. The symptoms might not present many reasons for worrying to the handset users, but the researchers could spot them quite easy. People who had been using a mobile phone for a period longer than one year, but no more than two years had a 16.48 decibel loss in the high-frequency range. Moreover, those who used the phones more than four years had a 24.54 decibel loss.
The researcher considers the results of his study still in the preliminary state and intends on continuing it up to the point of reaching some fully verified conclusions. Previous other studies have also warned on the potential impact that mobile phones might have on the users' hearing. There are also several ones which have failed in finding a relation between the two actions.