These Drugs Can Harm Your Hearing

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Ototoxic medications, literally "toxic to the ear," can include common prescription and nonprescription drugs, ranging from the seemingly benign, like aspirin and ibuprofen, to powerful chemotherapy drugs and certain antibiotics. People with hereditary hearing loss may be even more susceptible to their effects.

This month, a Seattle biotech start-up announced that it had received a $2 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to develop a drug to preserve hearing and balance in people being treated with a specific class of antibiotics.

Called aminoglycoside antibiotics, they include gentamicin, streptomycin and neomycin — all effective treatments for serious infectious diseases like septicemia and multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis. They are useful worldwide because of their low cost.

But they also can result in irreversible hearing loss and even deafness in up to 50 percent of patients, according to a Stanford University study published last year in theJournal of Clinical Investigation. The risk is highest in patients who already have hearing problems or have kidney disease. Doctors understandably have been cautious in relying on these drugs.