HEARING IN 18-YEAR-OLD SWEDISH MALES

In modern work practice, occupational noise exposure appears to be diminishing. Conversely, leisure noise activities appear to increase exposure to both the occurrence and the level of sound. If increased exposure to noise results in deteriorating hearing, one would expect to discover this by audiometric tests in teenagers. In the present investigation, 500 randomly selected conscripts from military service were tested. The mean hearing level was mostly well within that expected by international standards. The individual analyses show that 14% had some hearing loss defined as more than 20 dBHL in either ear and in the frequency range 0.25-8 kHz. This figure is considerably lower than recent reports from Norway and Great Britain. We did not find any correlation between different health parameters and hearing loss, except that conscripts of short stature tended to have more hearing loss. Consequently, we could not confirm an increasing general prevalence of hearing loss in young male individuals.