Page 46 - Fall2021

WHY WAS YOUR HEARING TESTED?
and in fact the whole head, inevitably, so that work- ers of this class become hard of hearing and, if they grow old at this work, completely deaf” (Ramazzini,
1713, 1964).
There was no compensation by industry for hearing loss until 1948 when the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the Workmen’s Compensation Board to award Mr. Slawinski $1,661.25 for his hearing loss he worked for J. H. Williams and Company. The court stated that hearing loss due to industrial noise is an occupational disease and that there may be a compen- sable disability in an occupational disease even without any loss of earnings. This ruling was rapidly advanced throughout the United States, with multiple lawsuits resulting in compensation for industrial noise-induced hearing loss. This resulted in required standards of preemployment and employment hearing testing. The Occupational Noise Exposure Revised Criteria (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1998) for audiometric evaluations of employees required that a baseline audiogram be obtained at inception of employ- ment, monitoring audiograms with retest audiograms conducted periodically during employment, and an exit audiogram taken at the termination of the work- er’s employment. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has specified the length of time an employee can be exposed to sounds of various intensi- ties, the details of programs for monitoring the hearing of employees, specifications for the equipment used for the monitoring of employees, and the use of protective gear and/or engineering controls (OSHA, 2021a). Now, many workers have multiple hearing evaluations while employed in industries with noise exposure, and the industries are required to have conservation of hearing programs (OSHA, 2021b).
Geriatric
The wide recognition of hearing loss in the aging popula- tion, presbycusis, has come about during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Concomitant with this has been the availability of accurate hearing testing, either in a facility or through the Internet. This quantitative documentation has allowed for the use of hearing aids. Hearing aid sales in the United States increased by approximately 750,000 in 1980 to more than 4,230,000 in 2019, a 5.6-fold increase (Hearing Review, 2021). This increase implies a similar increase in the number
of hearing tests carried out. One could estimate that for each hearing aid, there was at least one, if not two or three, hearing tests carried out before the hearing aid was actually utilized by the patient.
Hearing loss in the elderly has been associated with psy- chiatric illness (Eastwood et al., 1985) and diminished quality of life (Carabellese et al., 1993). Other studies have shown a correlation of presbycusis with mortality (Lam et al., 2006). A small study of eight patients with Alzheimer’s disease with hearing loss found that from one to four problem behaviors were significantly reduced for each patient after hearing aid treatment (Palmer et al., 1999). A study of depression in the elderly with hear- ing impairment showed that providing hearing aids had a significantly positive effect on the patients (Metselaar et al., 2009). These findings demonstrate the need for a geriatric hearing screening program.
Insofar as can be determined worldwide, no systematic hearing screening programs of the elderly are in place. The need for geriatric hearing screening will become even
greater as the population ages. This history has yet to be written.
Conclusions
Three questions have been addressed in this article.
(1) Why would you have a hearing test? Since 1800 to the present, people were tested to determine if they
had a hearing loss; to determine where the prob- lem, the disease entity, was that caused the hearing loss; to determine the extent of their hearing loss; to determine an intervention to ameliorate their hearing loss; to establish their fitness to serve in a particular role in an occupation or military service; and to protect them from further hearing loss due to sound trauma in the workplace.
(2) Who had a hearing test? Everyone from the new- born to the aged was tested. The first hearing test was in the newborn intensive care unit or nursery.
The last hearing test was when one is aged to pro- vide for a hearing aid that would not only help in communication but also as a way of mitigating some of the cognitive deficiencies of aging.
(3) How was your hearing tested? This started out with a voice test that was qualitative; Then there was and still is the use of tuning forks that was qualitative but allowed for localization of the disease; advances
46 Acoustics Today • Fall 2021