I’m sure we all know what smoking is bad for. It’s bad for our lungs, our blood pressure, our blood vessels, the heart, our skin, our teeth… The list goes on.

But a new contender has joined the list, because researchers from Manchester now say that smoking is bad for our hearing, and even from second hand smoke at that.

The researchers found that smokers and those exposed to second hand smoke were more likely to develop hearing loss than people who didn’t or those who had quit smoking.

Plus, the more cigarettes that people smoked every week, and the longer that they had smoked, the greater their risk of hearing loss.

This is a relatively new finding for researchers, so they’re not exactly sure why smokers are more likely to lose their hearing. But there are a few culprits up for questioning. It could be that the toxins in cigarettes directly affect our hearing, or it could likely be that cigarettes damage the blood vessels travelling to our ears because smoking increases our blood pressure.

Either way, hearing loss is just another example to add to the long list. As someone recently said, people see the cigarette now and not the lung disease in 20 years, but I think our hearing is something we’d all be a little more motivated to cling on to.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Source

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=12167