Noise-induced shifts in males and females for a battery of hearing tests

Abstract

Sex-related differences in the effects of noise on humans have been reported in several areas including physiological reactions, sleep disturbance, and permanent hearing threshold shift. It has been suggested that economic, social, and cultural factors may combine to reduce the opportunity for women to be exposed to high-level occupational and recreational noises. However, this contaminant is absent from research into noise-induced temporary threshold shift (TTS), because the noise exposures are carefully controlled in the laboratory performance of TTS studies. Most research into sex-related differences in temporary, auditory noise-exposure effects have been limited to the examination of threshold phenomena only. In the present study, a variety of noise-induced hearing changes have been examined. Subjects were tested before and after a one-half hour noise exposure using an audiometric test battery that included measures of pure-tone threshold, loudness discrimination, tone-on-tone masking, and loudness and pitch measuring of tinnitus. Data were examined for sex-related differences in the magnitude and incidence of noise-induced shifts in these auditory tasks. Implications of these findings for hearing conservation and for modeling noise effects are discussed.