Aspirin Can Prevent Hearing Loss From Ototoxic Medication
Editor: Researchers at the University of Michigan have
discovered that aspirin can prevent hearing loss that would
otherwise occur in users of a common family of antibiotics. The
obvious question is whether aspirin can prevent hearing loss
from other medications. How about from noise exposure? Around
the world, inexpensive antibiotics known as aminoglycosides have
been used for the past 60 years in the battles against acute
infections and tuberculosis, as antibacterial prophylaxis in
cystic fibrosis and other patients, and in and other conditions.
But for all of the good they do, the drugs also have been widely
linked to irreversible hearing loss. Now, researchers at the
University of Michigan's Kresge Hearing Research Institute and
their Chinese colleagues, working under the leadership of Jochen
Schacht, Ph.D., and Su-Hua Sha, M.D., have found that the
hearing loss can be prevented in many people with the use of
another inexpensive, widely available m