There are many ways that you can protect your hearing. Staying away from loud sounds is one of the most common, but what if you could protect your hearing by avoiding a medication? It turns out that this is the case with ibuprofen, a drug that many people around the nation use to treat minor aches and pains. Let’s examine the ways that this drug can cause hearing loss and ways to prevent it from happening.

Conclusive Findings

The American Journal for Advanced Epidemiology published the findings of a study which took place over 14 years. The study utilized 60,000 different women, following their hearing health over the course of fourteen years. The women who used the medications two or more times in a day were far more likely than others to exhibit hearing loss, with 25% of the women having some level of hearing loss.

Causes

There are two different ways that you can suffer from hearing loss as a result of taking acetaminophen and ibuprofen. The first is through a process known as ototoxicity, where the chemicals in medicines actually poison your inner ear and begin to crowd around the receptors needed for sound in the ear. Beyond that, the other way that you can have hearing loss from this medicine is by it controlling your blood pressure and flow inside of the ears. These medicines cause less blood to be available in the inner ear, which can choke off some areas and cause tremendous amounts of damage over time. This results in ringing in the ears, loss of hearing, and can even cause vertigo in some people. The best thing to do is to see a doctor and stop taking the medicine if you feel as though it is adversely affecting you.

More Research

The same people that discovered the link between women and hearing loss are working on a new project that is looking to see what makes women so much more susceptible to hearing loss from medications. In particular, the study is looking into the diets of the one hundred and fifty thousand volunteers as well as other factors that could be playing a role in the hearing loss.

What to Do

There are many different things that you can do if you are one of the people that have been taking ibuprofen but no longer want to risk your health. The first thing that you can do is to switch from the ibuprofen to a new medicine that does not cause you hearing harm but still relieves your pain. If you want to talk about a pain medicine regiment, then it is a good idea to speak to your doctor about possibilities.