Abstract
In order to study hearing changes caused by Kendo (Japanese fencing), we examined 33 students, aged between 15 and 18 years old, who were active members of a Kendo team at a senior high school in Miyazaki. The pure tone audiometry revealed that 10 out of 33 (30%) students had a various degrees of sensorineural hearing impairment. In paricular, abnormal audiograms with dips shown at 2kHz or at 4kHz seemed to feature the early audiometric changes caused by Kendo. Ears with a 2kHz-dip were found more frequently than those with a 4kHz-dip, and it was suggested that hearing impairment was caused by Kendo with some strong mechanisms, such as head contusion, in addition to acoustic trauma.
