Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

So interestingly enough, there was some backlash before widespread adoption.

And now, of course, you can't imagine doing anything precise.

without the use of a microscope, whether it's ear surgery or brain surgery or microvascular tissue transfer.

What we know is that women tend to have better hearing pre-menopausally.

But post-menopausally, they catch up to men.

So there are data showing that estrogen contributes to better hearing.

Now, larger-scale epidemiologic studies are being conducted.

As you know, for the longest time, women were not really studied in lots of clinical trials.

Most of clinical trials decades ago involved only men.

We already know from those studies that, for example, for a heart attack, how a woman presents with a heart attack could be very different than a man, where the classical description of a... Pain down the left arm.

They may not have discomfort, but no elephant pressing, no pain in the arm.

And so we are only now starting to understand all these differences, how different diseases manifest in men versus women and how they respond to different medications and different treatments.

And

Back to your question, what do we know about auditory sensitivity?

We do know that women tend to have better hearing premenopausally.

Now, does that have to do with environmental exposure?

That has to be factored in because traditionally men have been more involved in occupations that entail large noise exposures such as

military or construction.

But these days, everybody is exposed to recreationally loud music and noise levels.

So I think these studies need to be conducted with proper controls and proper sample sizes to really answer some of the questions you're asking.