Scientists, for years, have been studying lab animals in order to accumulate evidence that a pill could be able to lessen the damage to your hearing caused by noise. Now, they count on the Marines. The Marines all based in Camp Pendleton, California will start with their rifle training with foam plugs in their two ears and drinking up something that tastes like herbal tea coming in wild berry, a treat that all 600 of them might enjoy.
They'll take it with every meal during their two weeks of the noisy training, an experience that normally erodes a bit of hearing ability from about 10 percent of trainees. And if all goes as hoped, hearing tests will show that a substance dissolved in the drink made a difference. It's the latest wrinkle in research toward finding a pill that will help protect and even treat hearing loss from exposure to loud noise. Experts claim that while this is not a new effort at all, the past years saw that it picked up steam.
It is said, according to federal government reports, that loss of hearing due to noise exposure is the second most self reported occupational injury or malady and it is also the most common occupational disease. It has been found that people who either enter prolonged exposure to noisy surroundings or get caught in a sudden burst suffer from permanent hearing loss and to date, 10 million Americans have been affected. Approximately 30 million people are thought to be exposed to hazardous degrees of working noise like the sectors of mining, construction, agriculture and manufacturing.
People on the look out includes even those in the professional music scene. A man who was part of a huge band style performance may have forgotten to put on any protective ear device and this made him put his hands on his ears and duck while the trumpet sounded right behind him. Hobbies like recreational shooting, motorcycling and snowmobiling pose a risk, too.
It is wise to wear earplugs or earmuffs specifically made to kill sound, but then at most cases, they may not be enough. Some forms of sound might overwhelm these. A lot of individuals today just refuse to wear such things even when they know they have to while others are simply susceptible to hearing loss. And some sound levels can damage hearing by going through the skull, no matter what's protecting the ears.
That's because loud noise doesn't always damage the delicate inner ear immediately just by brute force. But we see that in most cases, the inner ear is provoked by it and thus we see it producing a lot of free radicals which are oxygen molecules proven to be very bad to the health. Free radicals are neutralized by antioxidants and the ear is naturally capable of protecting itself. But then the antioxidants found in the ear gets overwhelmed with a certain level of noise.
This shows that free radicals cause damage and death to the sound receptors within the ear. Building up the ear's antioxidant defenses as a preventive step, and then as a fast remedy after one is exposed to noise does make a lot of sense. There is much promise in animal experiments paving the way for prevention and this excites many people when they await the time that this security is applied to humans and protect them when they get exposed to noise.
There is one pioneer in the field of antioxidants for hearing who states that he has seen its marvelous effects on different patients. He had already patented the health supplement he regularly recommends to the several hundred patients who suffer a great deal from hearing loss and its setbacks brought by exposure to high levels of noise or simply aging. Improvements in the hearing ability of patients were evident and many of them saw that the progression of their hearing loss slowed down dramatically. Among those suffer from moderate to severe levels of hearing loss, they did not see any reason to throw away their hearing aids but then most of them were still swayed into leaving their aids behind for a while or switching to a smaller and less powerful mode.
A person who has long been involved with the experiment which entailed the participation of the Marines along with other science experts where able to elicit positive outcome in their experiment with various antioxidant compounds on animals. His concentration is on N acetylcysteine or NAC, a federally approved cure for overdoses on this well known painkiller. The ear's natural antioxidant defenses get bolstered as soon as the NAC neutralizes the free radicals inside. The loss of hearing gets minimized in the animals when animals were given NAC before getting exposed to noise as well as after. The effect generally means the difference on whether or not you need a hearing aid, when translated for humans.
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