What noise levels are considered safe to the ear?!
Question:
What noise levels are considered safe to the ear?
I have tinnitus and I get quite paranoid when listening to music, most of the times I turn the volume on fairly low as I don't want my tinnitus to get worse. What noise level is safe and wouldn't affect my tinnitus? I always hear that avoiding loud noises and sounds will relieve tinnitus, so what would be considered a loud noise? Thanks!
Answers:
The mechanism for chronic exposure to noise leading to hearing loss is well established. The elevated sound levels cause trauma to the cochlear structure in the inner ear, which gives rise to irreversible hearing loss.[5]
The outer ear (visible portion of the human ear) combined with the middle ear amplifies sound levels by a factor of 20 when sound reaches the inner ear.[9]
In Rosen's seminal work on serious health effects regarding hearing loss and coronary artery disease, one of his findings derived from tracking Maaban tribesmen, who were insignificantly exposed to transportation or industrial noise. This population was systematically compared by cohort group to a typical U.S. population. The findings proved that aging is an almost insignificant cause of hearing loss, which instead is associated with chronic exposure to moderately high levels of environmental noise