In this study, the hearing of the employees who work in telephone consultation was examined whether it had been affected by the noise exposures in the work environments. Noise can damage the sensitive structures in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). The fifteen employees with 5 years of working experience as a telephone counselor were the experimental group and fifteen employees who work in usual offices were the control group. Portable pure tone audiometry was conducted in a quiet room. In the result, the hearing of both ears was better in the control group than the experimental group. The degree of hearing loss in the right ear appeared larger than the left ear in the control group. Also, the pure tone average of the experimental group was significantly larger than that of the controal group. In particular, the differences of 4,000 and 8,000 Hz between groups were greater than other frequencies. These results indicated that noise environment affects hearing thresholds of the experimental group. However, in this study, we tested only 15 phone counselors. So further studies are needed to investigate a big test group.
INTRODUCTION MATERIALS AND METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSIONS REFERENCES
