A newly published study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports that undernutrition during early childhood is a risk factor for hearing loss in early adulthood.
From 2006-2008, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health carried out a study in Sarlahi, Nepal as a follow-up health and nutritional status assessment to an earlier project called Nepal Nutrition Intervention Project-1 (NNPIS-1), which was a cluster-randomized vitamin A supplementation trial for pre-school age children conducted between 1989 and 1991.
When asked about the reason behind the study, lead author Susan Emmett, MD, MPH said, "There are over a billion people living with hearing loss worldwide, and 80 percent are in low- and middle-income countries. With the tremendous lifelong impact of hearing loss on school achievement, economic outcomes, and overall health, it is essential to better understand why hearing loss is more common in low resource settings and what we can do to prevent it from happening in the first place."
The participants of the 2006-2008 research were 2193 young adults, with age range from 16 to 23, who were former participants of NNPIS-1. The results reveal that of the total number of participants, 5.93 percent exhibited hearing loss.
According to the paper titled "Early Childhood undernutrition increases risk of hearing loss in young adulthood in rural Nepal," early childhood malnutrition—wasting, stunting, being underweight—are associated with hearing loss. Participants who were malnourished during their early childhood were at higher risk for hearing impairment in their young adulthood. These undernutrition-hearing loss associations remained relevant even with research adjustments for age, sex, and multiple indicators of socioeconomic status, for abnormal tympanometry, and for cerumen impaction. The authors suggest that the association between preschool undernutrition and early adulthood hearing loss may have been a result of utero nutritional exposures or malnutrition that extends from fetal life through the preschool years.
“This study describes a new pathway for hearing loss prevention,” Emmett told The Hearing Journal. “We have identified nutritional risk factors and a window of opportunity, from fetal development through early childhood, to reduce the risk of later-life hearing loss. The results have implications for much of the Gangetic floodplain of South Asia, home to nearly 1 billion people and a region where undernutrition continues to be a problem.”
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