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So the Fourth is coming and people are very excited, especially in my town where we haven't had them for budget reasons for several years. But this year they're ba-aack and residents can't wait.  However, there's just one small thing.  They can damage your hearing. According to newswise.com, a new study has found that fireworks, construction and being in a marching band can cause to lose hearing permanently. I come from a family where both my mother and grandmother went deaf at early ages.  My grandmother, who was a concert pianist, never learned sign language so she and my mother never had a conversation till my mom was 16 -- when she finally got a hearing aid. I recently took a hearing test and scored "slightly below normal."  They didn't really need to tell me because I already knew, having trouble hearing people sometimes with soft voices in a noisy background.  In my case, it's probably age! But the study found that outdoor concerts, pa...

Now, this will astonish you.  And break your heart.  But a new study has found that obesity  in teens can lead to hearing loss. Growing up with a deaf mother and grandmother, I know how debilitating this is.  My mother wasn't able to have a conversation with her mother until she was 16 years old. A story in today's New York Times reports that "the definition of obesity in teenagers — was independently associated with poorer hearing over all frequencies, and with almost double the risk of low-frequency hearing loss in one ear."   Even worse, researchers suggest that this may be the early signs of losing your hearing in both ears, as happens in adults. That bad boy, inflammation, is at work here, too. It's thought that, when it's induced by obesity, it "may be a factor in organ damage," Nicholas Bakalar writes. (Inflammation is also a player in cancer and heart disease.) Losing weight, of course, would help, but so would early intervention, doc...