Search

What’s new in protecting hearing?

Preventing an avoidable hearing loss before it begins would be the public health dream. In this article Kathleen Campbell takes us through one option that is showing the potential to fulfil that ambition. Kathleen explains the development of a preventative...

Plasticity with cochlear implants: individual factors in the outcomes

Andrej Kral gives us an overview of neuronal plasticity in congenital hearing loss, and discusses why it is core to our clinical interventions in hearing loss and rehabilitation. The brain is born immature and undergoes extensive shaping during early development....

Genetics and the newborn hearing screen: the future is now

Eliot Shearer shares the progress being made with newborn hearing screening 60 years on from where it started, and future directions for identifying hearing loss using physiologic, genetic and cCMV screening. Newborn screening had its birth in the early 1960s,...

Innovative approaches to treating deafness

Shahar Taiber and Karen Avraham give us a summary of gene therapies for hearing loss, with an overview of limitations and what the future holds. Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder. The last two decades have seen a...

Hearables: in-ear sensing devices for recording of physiological signals

Colver Ken Howe Ne, Jameel Muzaffar and Manohar Bance discuss the potential of hearable systems to monitor physiological signals (e.g. from brain or heart, blood pressure, body temperature) unobtrusively. Such adaptations require high-quality sensors and sophisticated de-noising signal processing on...

A new approach to workplace hearing conservation

The traditional approach to managing workplace noise has failed - how can we better protect our nation’s hearing using smart hearing protection? Occupational noise-induced hearing loss (ONIHL) is the most common occupational health condition in the world and the most...

St Blaise - patron saint of the throat

In a previous article, we looked at some interesting legends surrounding patron saints of the ear and hearing [1]. As we celebrate the Feast Day of St Blaise of Sebastia on 3 February, we hear some fascinating tales and myths...

EEG as a measure of neuroplasticity in children

Measuring changes in neural activity can teach us a lot about hearing loss and the effect of gained functional hearing. In this article, the authors describe how electroencephalography (EEG) is being used to effectively measure such changes in children with...

St Æbbe the Younger of Coldingham, patron saint of the nose

Stories of the saints are often rather dark and unpleasant – and this is certainly the case with St Æbbe, as we hear from our roving historian, John Riddington Young. In two previous articles, we have discovered the fascinating stories...