Young adults at higher risk of hearing loss after Covid infection, data suggest | Hacker News Reader

Young adults at higher risk of hearing loss after Covid infection, data suggest

cidrap.umn.edu

21 pointsamichail11 comments

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Most likely, the loss of hearing is caused by prescribed medications that are of ototoxic nature.

A complete list of medicine that have been known to cause hearing-loss.

Disclaimer: I lost all my hearing during to one dosage of "quit-smoking" drug. Court case still pending after 8 years.

https://www.europeanreview.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/956.pdf

No, that is not what is "most likely" that's just a completely unrelated thing that happened to you.

And you know this how that it is not related at all to hearing loss?

Anecdotals and court cases are not a small percentage, not even close.

I’m inclined to think that it’s due to the same mechanisms that cause loss of taste and smell, and vision problems, and neurological issues, and…

There’s quite a bit of literature on the significant oxidative stress from SARS-CoV-2 infection. And on the relationship between oxidative stress and hearing problems.

Okay now do the same study for all other respiratory viruses…

If this happens with other respiratory viruses as well, then this would give you even more reason to protect yourself from infection.

That's a valid response. The other directional response is, the amount of hearing loss incurred historically is acceptable to me, so I'm not concerned at all.

Why?

Because other illnesses are more common, protecting yourself from respiratory illness in general would have an even bigger benefit than only avoiding COVID.

This is an interesting moment in culture around norms with respiratory illness. We masked and distanced with COVID to reduce the impact of a pandemic because COVID exceeded a threshold for our willingness to accept the impact, although granted that that was controversial.

Now many of us are re-evaluating our risk thresholds. The two approaches in this thread predominate: - If a certain level of risk was hegemonically acceptable before COVID, shouldn't that be acceptable now? - OR, perhaps we accepted too much epidemiological risk pre-COVID, and we should have lower risk-tolerance thresholds now.

> Now many of us are re-evaluating our risk thresholds.

That sounds like a really sensible strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and evolving. We should be continuously re-evaluating our risk thresholds to take into consideration current levels of community spread, the amount of strain being put on local healthcare services, new strains of the virus as they emerge and the differences in symptoms/severity/transmissibility for them as well as the effectiveness of current vaccines and immune responses to protect against those new strains, new advances in treatment and prevention, and new information or clarification on the long term risks/impacts/consequences of infection and prior infections.

As long as the virus is being passed around at high rates there's always a risk that a new strain will show up which makes our current treatments/vaccines ineffective or does much greater harm to people who get infected. As scientists continue to work to improve our understanding of the virus we could also wake up one day to find a very effective treatment or a highly effective preventative has been discovered that would improve our health outcomes and/or drastically reduce the spread of the virus.

It'd be pretty risky to stop re-evaluating your risks and responses to this situation since it changes rapidly.

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