Research Notes

There may be more significance to the color of one's eyes than cues to wardrobe selections. One study links dark eyes to lower incidence of noise-associated hearing loss (M.-L. Barrenas, F. Lindgren. "The influence of inner ear melanin on susceptibility to TTS in humans," Scandinavian Audiology, 19:97-102, 1990), and another indicates that having brown eyes raises the risk of hearing loss following cisplatin chemotherapy (T.N. Wendell et al., "Cisplatin in children: hearing loss correlates with iris and skin pigmentation," Journal of Laryngology and Otology, 109, 926-9, 1995). Apparently melanin in the inner ear, more abundant in the darker-eyed, retains cisplatin metabolites that are toxic to the cochlea. Now an observant audiological scientist at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton, U.K., has added another eye color-health link to this list. According to Helen E. Cullington, those with light-colored eyes are more likely to become deaf after meningitis than those with brown eyes. "A few years ago, I began to notice that when I called the name of my meningitis-deafened patients in a crowded waiting room, it would always be the blond and blue-eyed children who came. I started to look at it informally and really began to see that most of them did have light eyes, so I felt it would warrant further study," she says. So Cullington recorded the eye color of 130 deaf patients who have cochlear implants (H.E. Cullington, "Light eye colour linked to deafness after meningitis," British Medical Journal, 322:587, March 10, 2001.). Among the 32 patients whose deafness followed meningitis, 30 (94 percent) had light eyes. And among the 98 whose hearing loss was not associated with meningitis, only 72 (73 percent) had light eyes, a proportion nearly identical to that found in a large-scale study of the hearing population. Concludes Cullington, "The difference in proportions of eye color between the survivors of meningitis and the U.K. adult population was significant. People with light eyes were 5.8 times as likely to be deafened by meningitis than those with dark eyes."