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Hearing loss is not a well-known adverse health consequence of obesity in adults. Researchers examined this association in 1488 adolescents aged 12 to 19 years using cross-sectional data from the 2005–2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Body-mass indexes from the 5th to 85th percentile were considered normal weight, from 86th to 94th percentile were overweight, and ≥95th percentile were obese. Compared with normal-weight teens, obese teens had a greater prevalence of low-frequency unilateral sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL; >15 dB, 15% vs. 8%) as well as bilateral low- and unilateral and bilateral high-frequency SNHL, but these trends were not statistically significant. In multivariate analysis that controlled for numerou…