Effect of Age and Sex on Hearing by Pure Tone Audiometry.

ABSTRACT

Hearing loss is known to vary from place to place and country to country in both sexes with advancing age. There is scarcity of such information in India, and even no study is available from the Ghaziabad belt of North India. This prompted us to undertake a study on hearing impairment in the local population at Ghaziabad. It included three hundred persons, half of them were males and rest of the half were females. Selection of cases was done randomly. The age of the subjects ranged from 15 to 80 years, cases were divided into four groups. Only healthy subjects were selected for the study after thorough history taking and examination.Mild degree of hearing loss was observed in both men and women at middle and older age groups, percentage of males having hearing loss was more than women . Mean age ofhearing loss in women was 51.22 years and 51.55 years in men, but with advancing age further hearing loss in women takes less time than in men. With advancing age loss of hearing threshold is less in lower frequencies in men as compared to women whereas with advancing age loss of hearing threshold in higher frequencies is more in men than women , statistically the results were highly significant.