Audiological findings of family farmers exposed to pesticides.
Diolen Conceição Barros Lobato, Patrícia Arruda de Souza Alcarás, Denise Maria Vaz Romano França and 3 others
PMID 37672475WHAT IT FOUND
Family farmers exposed to pesticides had poorer hearing than unexposed people.
They needed louder sounds to hear, had more missing middle-ear reflexes, and weaker inner-ear sound responses. This links exposure to hearing problems but does not prove cause.
Key findings
01Exposed farmers had higher conventional and high-frequency hearing thresholds than unexposed controls.
02Exposed farmers had more absent acoustic reflexes than controls at several frequencies in both ears.
03Exposed farmers had weaker transient and distortion-product otoacoustic emission responses than controls.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study did not quantify pesticide exposure, so it could not analyse dose-response or identify safe exposure levels. It cannot prove that pesticides caused the hearing differences; it found an association between pesticide exposure and peripheral hearing disorders. Exposure and noise history were self-reported, and controls were drawn from an audiology database rather than randomly selected. Only participants without cerumen or foreign body, chronic or otological disease, and with normal middle ear were included, so findings may not apply to farmers with ear disease. The otoacoustic emission subgroup was small, which may have affected the suppression-effect results. The test battery was not exhaustive.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the hearing differences as proof that pesticides caused them. This was a cross-sectional study without quantitative pesticide exposure data, so it can show association but not cause and effect.