"National Ear Care Day": Six aspects of ear care should be taken care of

March 3 is the 23rd "National Ear Care Day" and the 10th "World Hearing Day". The theme of this year's National Ear Care Day is: Care for hearing health, listen to a wonderful future. The theme of World Hearing Day is: Use your ears carefully, and you will have good hearing for life. The reporter interviewed Wu Xiangming, deputy chief physician of the Department of Otolaryngology of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical College (abbreviated as: Hainan Medical College Second Hospital), and asked him to share health knowledge about ear protection for the general public.

Wu Xiangming introduced that the hearing threshold of normal hearing people is 20 decibels or below, and people with less than good hearing have hearing loss. During the hearing test, a hearing threshold greater than 20dB indicates clinical hearing loss.

If hearing loss is not addressed, it can negatively impact many areas of life: communication, children's language and speech development, cognition, education, employment, mental health, and relationships.

The impact of hearing loss is not determined solely by severity, but depends largely on the effectiveness of the clinical or rehabilitation interventions taken and the extent to which the environment is responsive to the needs of the hearing-impaired person.

Wu Xiangming said that there are three main causes of sudden deafness:

1. Unhealthy lifestyle is one of the main causes of deafness. Young people are stressed by study and exams, or they spend a long time wearing headphones to listen to music, talking on the phone, singing karaoke, playing mahjong all night, and working overtime. This is the lifestyle of some young and middle-aged people nowadays. Unknowingly, many people's hearing is seriously damaged and they are prone to sudden deafness.

Loud noise is also a major cause of sudden deafness. Noise can easily take away hearing, and if you stay in a noisy working environment for a long time and do not pay attention to adjustment and rest, it is easy to cause sudden deafness.

2. Pay attention to avoid viral infections in daily life. Many patients have a history of colds before the onset of the disease.

3. Tumor factors, especially acoustic neuroma or facial neuroma, which cause compression of the patient's auditory nerve, can also lead to sudden hearing loss.

Some people also suffer from abnormal blood flow to the inner ear. The inner ear is supplied by the labyrinthine artery, which is relatively small and prone to spasm or vascular embolism, resulting in insufficient blood supply and hearing loss.

How to take care of your ears? Wu Xiangming said that you should start from the following six aspects:

1. Avoid noise stimulation

Although the ears have a certain protection mechanism, when the sound is particularly loud or the noise stimulation lasts for a long time, the protection mechanism will fail, causing damage to the inner ear, and then tinnitus and hearing loss. Therefore, you should change the habit of wearing headphones for a long time, and even more so, change the habit of wearing headphones to listen to music in a noisy environment to block out the noise. If you must be exposed to noise, you should actively use earplugs.

2. Avoid using ototoxic drugs

The most common ototoxic drugs are aminoglycoside antibiotics (streptomycin, kanamycin, neomycin, gentamicin, etc.). When using them, you should pay attention to changes in hearing or tinnitus. If there are deaf patients among your close relatives, you should be more careful, because if there is a hereditary mitochondrial abnormality, "one shot can cause deafness", and sensitive people may even become deaf after using related drugs as eye drops.

3. Maintain a good attitude and living habits

Anxiety, anger, fatigue and staying up late are all triggering factors.

4. Avoid viral colds during pregnancy

Especially in the early stages of pregnancy, which happens to be the period when the ear structure develops, viral infection may cause abnormal development of the ear structure, resulting in ear deformities or hearing abnormalities.

5. Actively treat middle ear inflammation

Long-term inflammatory stimulation will cause chronic otitis media, which will damage our auditory ossicles and affect the conduction of sound. The epithelium on the surface of the tympanic membrane can enter our middle ear through perforation to form cholesteatoma, which will damage the middle ear and even the inner ear, and may cause a series of serious intracranial and extracranial complications including facial paralysis and brain abscess.

6. Seek medical attention if you have any problems

Doctors develop personalized treatment plans based on the condition and nature of the deafness, because research shows that "the earlier hearing loss is treated, the better the possible results."

Wu Xiangming reminded that some people feel very comfortable when cleaning their ears in daily life. In fact, improper ear cleaning has many hazards, which may cause ear canal inflammation. The earwax cannot be removed, but the earwax is dug deeper and deeper, causing blockage of the ear canal and affecting hearing. In severe cases, it may cause perforation of the eardrum or even intracranial infection. In addition, the skin of the ear canal is very thin and delicate. Frequent ear cleaning will cause contact and friction to damage the skin of the ear canal and cause inflammation. In addition, cleaning the ears with hands or unclean tools may bring microorganisms into the ear canal, causing ear canal infection and eczema.