Elderly health has increasingly aroused the interest of researchers, as the population in both developed and devel-oping countries is aging. It is estimated that by 2040 developing countries will have a billion people aged 60 years or older. Given the rapidity and magnitude of this increase,care for this specific group is essential, so they can age in good health and with good quality of life. The most common types of hearing loss are presbycusis(due to aging) and noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). NIHL is due to continued exposure to loud noise levels, resulting in gradual loss of auditory acuity and is usually bilateral,symmetric, sensorineural and irreversible. It usually affects the high audiometric frequencies of 3000---6000 Hz. The etiology of hearing loss also has genetic components, in addition to environmental ones, and more recently, inner ear inflammatory response induction and up-regulation of proinflammatory cytokines were evaluated in the presence of exacerbated noise. Several researchers have reported the presence of inflammatory cells in the steady state and their increase after lesions in the inner ear. Noise exposure induces the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including tumor necrosis factor-(TNF-), interleukin 1 (IL-1) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). So et al. observed a transient up-regulation of IL-6 in cisplatin-treated animal models. Wakabayashi et al. investigated the effect of IL-6 inhibition using an anti-IL-6(MR16-1) antibody in mice. These authors found that MR16-1 showed a protective effect against noise-in duced cochlear injury, mainly due to neuronal loss suppression and presumably by relieving the inflammatory response,similar data were found by Nakamoto et al. The seauthors suggested that the suppression of proinflammatory cytokine HSF-1 in the cochlea by the administration of GGA (geranyl-geranyl-acetone) could be an important way to protect the inner ear.The expression of cytokines may be influenced by genetic variation, resulting in pathogenic conditions and several studies have investigated single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs) as risk factors for inflammatory diseases. These SNPs may affect the expression, secretion and cellular trans-port of in terleukins and can also decrease the level of the IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), which increases the production and activity of IL-1. The SNP in the region −174 of the interleukin-6 gene contains the replacement of G by C, and the presence of the C allele represents a protective function due to reduced production of IL-6. Considering that NIHL is involved in the inflammatory pro-cess, this study aimed to evaluate the association between the proinflammatory cytokine-6 (IL-6) gene polymorphismand susceptibility to NIHL in physically independent elderly Brazilians.