Acute bilateral hearing loss during a pop concert: consideration for differential diagnosis.

A 40-year-old male administration employee suffered an acute acoustic trauma while attending a pop concert. This paper discusses the differential diagnosis. The patient's mother was also hard of hearing following bomb attacks during the last war. The degree of hearing loss did not correlate with the effect of the noise in either case. It is therefore assumed that the inner ear has developed greater susceptibility to noise. The origin of this is attributed to a genetically induced weakness of the cochlea to exogenous factors.