About three years ago, Ryan Arnold, 46, started noticing conversations were becoming harder to follow in restaurants and crowded rooms with background noise.
“I found myself asking people to repeat themselves more often, especially if they weren’t facing me,” said Arnold, founder and president of DeSoto & State Communications and a former on-air personality at Chicago’s WXRT-FM (93.1). In the last year, the decline grew more noticeable; the persistent ringing in his ears, known as tinnitus, became harder to ignore.