Hearing in Teens

A ground-breaking longitudinal study testing how teenagers’ hearing changes as they start going to nightclubs, gigs, and other high-noise environments.

Over the past 15 years, a flurry of research has looked for hidden noise-induced damage. It’s an important issue, because many types of damage could be missed by standard hearing tests, so noise might do more harm than scientists once thought. But results have been inconclusive, likely for several reasons:

• damage may be subtle, at least at first
• different types of damage occur together
• all tests for the damage are indirect
• studies haven’t included enough people
• studies have looked cross-sectionally (testing hearing once), not longitudinally (testing for changes in hearing)
• study plans haven’t been pre-registered (committed to specific analysis methods, to prevent findings being distorted)

In 2021-22, 220 teenagers signed up for the HIT study and underwent around 3.5 hours of testing, including high-frequency audiometry, OAEs, ABRs, MEMRs, masked speech perception, and spatial selective attention.

In 2023-24, they turn 18, the age at which many people start regularly attending gigs and nightclubs.

In 2025, the participants return to the lab, and we’ll test whether those with greater noise exposure have signs of hearing damage. We’ll also investigate which parts of the hearing pathway are affected, the consequences for auditory perception, and whether some people’s ears are more vulnerable than others.