Generally the last thing people think about after a nasty bump on the head is getting a hearing test, since it’s not generally the part of the body that gets the most obvious injuries. And the fact is, any damage to the mechanisms of hearing don’t always occur right away. In fact there are some that appear much later for a whole series of reasons.
A recent study out of Loyala University Medical Centre has focussed on people who are playing, or, more importantly, used to play high energy contact sports, like football or rugby. The question they are trying to answer is whether former football/rugby/hockey players are any more prone to hearing loss and tinnitus after their careers have ended than the average person who did not play such sports.
We have known for many years that people who were involved in bad car accidents or had bad workplace head injuries have a tendency toward a higher likelihood of hearing loss and tinnitus, symptoms that don’t often appear until long after the insurance has closed the file. The force of one’s neck snapping during a car accident or the sheer blunt force of a concussive hit to the cranium can harm several of the hearing pathways including the nerves in the cochlea, the nerves that transmit the information from the cochlea to the brain or the brain tissue which translates those signals into something we understand as speech or other auditory signals. Sometimes these various forms of trauma don’t show up for years.
The opposite end of the scale is when the trauma is bad enough to damage the three little bones behind the ear drum. If they become dislodged the effects are immediate and often very noticeable.
So what is the answer? Well, so far the neurologists at Loyola have not gathered enough information to come up with any real answers. There are several reasons for this; one is that they can’t find enough older retired players to test, and of those, perhaps they never suffered any concussions. My guess would be that if they focussed on rugby players, they may get some more concrete data – it’s a rough game and they don’t generally wear head protection, which makes them much more vulnerable to injury. If they do make such a connection, it could lead to lawsuits later on, as we have already seen happen in some professional sports, but more importantly, it may lead to changes in how we protect our heads when we are playing these sports, (well, when you are, I’m beyond those days!).
In the interim anyone who does play contact sports where the head can be injured, or anyone who has been in a serious car accident or work accident, should have their hearing checked yearly to ensure it isn’t affected. Also report any signs of tinnitus to your family physician or hearing practitioner immediately.