A new study has found that consuming caffeine after being exposed to the high-volume noise of a concert can negatively affect the ear’s ability to recover from all those…
The study, conducted at Canada’s McGill University Auditory Sciences Laboratory and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that caffeine can lead the ears to recover at a much slower rate after experiencing high-volume sound.
Researchers set up three groups of female albino guinea pigs, and exposed one group to caffeine, one group to what they call acoustic overstimulation events (AOSEs, or LOUD NOISES), and another group to both caffeine and AOSEs.
Caffeine was administered on each day of the 15-day experiment, while the 110-dB noises were blasted on days one and eight, for one hour each day.
The results of tests on the 24 guinea pigs show that the animals who copped both caffeine and the LOUD NOISES recovered their hearing at a much slower rate than their buddies who only heard the sound.
For example, the group who only heard the sound had recovered their hearing pretty well by day eight, whereas the ones exposed to caffeine suffered from some hearing impairment at certain frequencies while their ears healed more slowly.
In conclusion, the researchers note that, “A daily dose of caffeine was found to impair the recovery of hearing after an AOSE.” They also believe that with caffeine and noise-related hearing loss so prevalent in society, their findings could have a significant impact.
Dr. Faisal Zawawi, who was involved in the study, says, “When the ear is exposed to loud noise, it can suffer from a temporary hearing reduction, also called auditory temporary threshold shift.
“This disorder is usually reversible in the first 72 hours after the exposure, but if symptoms persist, the damage could become permanent.”
Better lay off those foamy lattes then, huh?