TURN down the music and listen: regular exposure to even moderately loud noise increases the risk of developing an ear tumour that harms your hearing.
Researchers asked a group of 146 people with a benign ear tumour called acoustic neuroma what sort of noise they had been exposed to in the past, and compared their responses with those of 564 people who did not have tumours. Regular exposure to noise exceeding 80 decibels, a level typical of traffic, made people 1.55 times as likely to develop the tumour as those from the quietest environments.
Studies in birds suggest that the…
