Conclusions
It can be concluded that smoking accompanied by
occupational exposure to noise may accelerate binaural
hearing impairment, which should be confirmed by other
studies. If longitudinal studies confirm this finding, we can
recommend that giving up smoking or adjusting this habit can
delay binaural hearing impairment or decrease its intensity.
We can also recommend that interval between audiometric
assessments should be lowered (e.g. biannual instead of
annual) to diagnose hearing complications sooner and prevent
hearing impairment and eventually reduce the compensation
costs due to it.