To Your Health
March, 2018 (Vol. 12, Issue 03) |
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Smoking Can Even Harm Your Hearing
By Editorial Staff
If you don't know smoking is profoundly destructive to your health by now, you're not just a non-smoker; we're also surprised you're reading this article, since you clearly haven't kept up to date on news, much less research, for the past 50-plus years.
Yes, smoking is responsible for a staggering one in five deaths every year in the U.S., according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Smoking can cause lung cancer (and cancer in almost any other area of the body), coronary heart disease, stroke, reduced immune function, poor bone health, impaired fertility and a host of other health conditions. And the list keeps getting longer.
Case in point: A study published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research found that compared to nonsmokers, current smokers who smoked up to 10 cigarettes daily were 40 percent more likely to develop high-frequency hearing loss, and 10 percent more likely to suffer low-frequency hearing loss. High-frequency hearing is what lets us understand / detect high-frequency sounds, such as female speech or a bird tweeting; low-frequency hearing allows us to hear deep voices, booming audio, etc.
The more cigarettes smoked per day, the greater the hearing loss; in fact, for smokers with a daily habit of 20 or more cigarettes, the risk for high-frequency hearing loss increased to 70 percent and 40 percent for low-frequency hearing loss.
It's time to listen (before it's too late) to what the research is shouting loud and clear: Smoking damages the human body in just about every way imaginable. If you're a smoker, talk to your doctor about effective ways to stop for good. Your health – your life – absolutely depends on it.
