CLINTON GETS HEARING AIDS AT CHECKUP.

Byline: Brigid Schulte Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Blame it on the din at political rallies. The roar of the crowds. His genes. Or that blaring saxophone. Bill Clinton has to wear a hearing aid.

The president, now 51, has been complaining for years about his hearing. On Friday, at his annual physical examination, his doctors decided his hearing was damaged enough in both ears for Clinton to be fitted with two nearly undetectable hearing aids, which will fit in his ear canal.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry said Clinton has been having trouble hearing over the chatter, laughter and clink of forks on plates and ice against glasses at noisy receptions. And he is unable to hear what hecklers yell out to him during speeches.

His doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital called it ``high-frequency'' hearing loss.

``He's just seeing that he cannot understand as much as he needs to understand,'' said James Suen, an ear, nose and throat doctor, who examined him Friday.

Suen said Clinton will use the hearing aids only when he thinks he needs them.

Apart from his hearing loss, Clinton was ``in excellent overall health and feeling very good,'' McCurry said.

The president has shed 20 pounds over the past year, weighing in at 196 pounds on his 6-foot-2-inch frame. His blood pressure was 122 over 68, pulse 60. His total cholesterol was 179, down from 191 last year.

Surgeons cut a one-centimeter cyst from the skin of his left chest, a five-minute procedure that required a local skin anesthetic and left the president with two stitches. The cyst ``will be sent for pathology, but I would be amazed if anything were to show other than totally benign,'' said Dr. David Corbett, who excised it. The pathology report will be available Monday.

The president's personal physician, Dr. Connie Mariano, pronounced Clinton ``fully recovered from his quadriceps tendon tear,'' the knee injury he suffered in March that put him on crutches for several months.

Clinton not only joins Ronald Reagan as a hearing aid wearer in the Oval Office, but an estimated 28 million Americans who suffer from some form of hearing loss. The National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 10 million of those could benefit from some type of hearing aid, but that only half of them do.

While he has succumbed to bifocals and other signs of an aging baby boomer, Clinton is young for the kind of hearing loss he's experiencing, one hearing expert said.

``It's unusual for a 51-year-old to have enough hearing loss to justify wearing a hearing aid,'' said Dr. George A. Gates, director of the Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Gates and other doctors who specialize in hearing loss said Clinton's inability to hear clearly in crowded rooms and at noisy events is what they call the ``cocktail party effect.'' It is usually one of the first signs of high-frequency hearing loss.

In early life, children can hear frequencies as high as 24,000 cycles per second. The highest note on a piano is 4,000 cycles per second. Human speech ranges from 125 to 3,000 cycles per second for telephone conversations, Gates said. But as we age, we begin to lose hearing at the higher frequencies.

Once that happens, not only are separate conversations in noisy rooms indistinguishable, but the ability to hear consonants is lost.

``If I said `mat' or `map' or `mash' and they all sounded the same because you couldn't hear the final consonant, guess what interesting things can happen to you,'' Gates said. ``And that's the problem. It's not one of hearing, it's one of understanding speech sounds. We know that's what (Clinton's) experiencing. High frequencies are very important to us.''

No one really knows for sure what causes this type of hearing loss, called presbycusis, only that it's very common. Age is one factor. Exposure in teen years to the deafening noise of steel mills, boiler rooms or factories is another. Shooting guns, attending rock concerts - anything that leaves young ears ringing can cause later hearing damage, Gates said.

Heredity may play a role in why some people become hard of hearing earlier in life than others.

``But everybody's going to get presbycusis. If you live long enough, you're going to get some kind of high-frequency hearing loss,'' Gates said. ``Remember, in Roman times, if you were 40, you were an ancient senior citizen. They died in their 30s. So, maybe we're outliving our biology.''

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Photo

Photo: President Clinton strains to hear supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at a Nov. 4, 1996, campaign rally.

Associated Press