Golf's newest hazard? Hearing impairment

The winner of this weekend’s U.S. Open may get more than a trophy. He also could come away with hearing impairment.

Actually, it may be a hazard for many modern-day golfers.

A paper in the December issue of the British Medical Journal detailed the story of a 55-year-old man who was suffering from hearing impairment. The man went to see Malcolm Buchanan, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Norwich University Hospital in England.

“The patient’s audiogram showed a characteristic dip then rise at the higher frequencies on the right (ear), suggestive of noise-induced damage,” Buchanan wrote in an e-mail.

The cause? The man had been playing golf three times a week for 18 months, using a King Cobra LD titanium club. The patient described hitting the ball with the club was “like a gun going off.”

Buchanan said the patient had no previous history of noise exposure but the tinnitus (ringing in the ears) was characteristic of noise exposure.

Could golf really cause the problem?

“He may have had a more susceptible inner ear, which could have made him more prone to noise damage, despite the relative infrequent exposure to the noise,” Buchanan wrote. “I’m not sure, but he may have been practicing at a golf driving range, where the sound could have reflected off the walls of the bay. The duration of the noise (around 50 microseconds) would have been too short to allow time for the ear’s protective mechanism to react, and shield the hearing nerve from potentially damaging sounds.”

The patient’s troubles prompted Buchanan and three others to study the sound levels produced by different golf drivers. They had a professional golfer hit three balls with six thin-faced titanium drivers and six thicker-faced stainless steel drivers. A modular precision sound level meter recorded the levels of sound impulse.

The distance from the right ear of the golfer to the point of impact between the club and ball was 1.7 meters (about 5.5 feet). The thin-faced titanium clubs all produced greater sound levels than the stainless steel clubs. Surprisingly, the King Cobra LD was not the loudest.

In their paper, the group’s findings “show that thin-faced titanium drivers may produce sufficient sound to induce temporary, or even permanent, cochlear damage, in susceptible individuals.”

Buchanan said he had no idea that golf clubs could cause this damage, but since the paper was published, he’s found the incident is not isolated.

“I have since been contacted by another golfer who suffers from tinnitus every time he hits with his driver, and feels that his hearing is down as a result, but his family doctor refuses to believe there may be a connection, and he hasn’t yet had a hearing test,” Buchanan wrote. “Additionally, a colleague of mine has seen a 13-year-old boy who has bilateral noise-induced hearing loss on his audiogram, and his mother volunteered the information that he plays golf most days with a very loud driver. I am looking into this particular case now in more detail.”

| To reach Pete Grathoff, call 816-234-4330 or send e-mail to pgrathoff@kcstar.com

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