Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Fans Risk Hearing Loss

"For diehard football fans, nothing beats screaming your lungs out in the stadium alongside tens of thousands of other fans."

"There is, however, a downside: hearing loss."

"With the battle among fans to be the loudest crowd getting almost as competitive as the NFL itself, hearing experts say it's time for a serious conversation about the damage caused by crowd noise."

"'As you can imagine, it is a sensitive issue in the midst of an unbelievable season,' says Nancy Alarcon, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Washington in Seattle."

"The crowd noise at NFL games currently averages between 80 and 90 decibels, according to Jack Wrightson of the acoustical consulting firmWrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams, Inc. in Dallas. That, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, is already hovering around the 'loud' and 'extremely loud' range."