Changes in the mean hearing threshold levels in military aircraft maintenance conscripts.

Aircraft maintenance crews are constantly exposed to severe aircraft noise. The purpose of this study was to verify whether noise from aircraft adversely affects the hearing threshold levels (HTLs) of aircraft maintenance conscripts during their 2 years of mandatory military service. This study included 3,000 male aircraft maintenance conscripts who work in the military runway area. We measured and analyzed HTLs at 2-4 kHz. The duration of exposure to noise increased with an increase in rank; however, HTLs showed a tendency to decrease. We attributed such contradicting results to the learning effect and adaptation to military service. However, we suspected that sudden deafness in 6 conscripts (0.2%) was due to loud noise in the runway area during military service. The effectiveness of the hearing conservation program for short-term military service personnel could be increased by focusing on preventing sudden deafness and preenlistment baseline audiogram tests.