Hearing loss in divers in Red sea

ABSTRACT

As the popularity of Scuba diving [diving with self contained underwater breathing apparatus] continues to grow scientists are better able to determine what the long-term effects on the human body, the group at high risk for adverse effects is professional divers making repeat deep dives with shortened decompression times. The most well-known injuries of diving are dysbaric osteonecrosis, hearing loss, and permanent neurological deficits, usually the result of a decompression accident; these effects may occur without decompression incident or injury. Reports of cognitive dysfunction and damage to the liver, retina, and heart of the diver with no history of decompression sickness are now emerging, these symptoms may occur gradually and away from the dive site, physicians should be aware of the signs and symptoms related to adverse events of diving in order to minimize its morbidity and mortality to detect the effect of scuba diving on the hearing threshold of sport divers who have no history of excessive noise exposure or of diving-related inner ear damage. Thirty of sport divers were included in our study compared with thirty control group of non divers, both groups were subjected to clinical assessment, tympanometry, pure tone audiometery. Divers group shows significant difference in sensory neural hearing loss at high frequency 4KHz,6KHz,8KHz, while there were no significant difference in low frequency at 0.5KHz1KHz,2KHz. Sport diving is risky for long term diving as it affect inner ear causing high tone sensory neural hearing loss, follow up is advised for hearing sport divers especially the professionals