Your hearing also can be damaged — sometimes irreversibly — by the drugs you take, writes Katherine Bouton on the AARP's website, aarp.org.
They're called ototoxic medications, which means toxic to the ear, and they can include common drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen, as well as chemotherapy drugs and some antibiotics. And people with hereditary hearing loss may be even more susceptible.
The antibiotics in question are aminoglycoside antibiotics, and they include gentamicin, streptomycin and neomycin, which are used to treat serious infectious diseases like septicemia and multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis.
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