With a population of more than a billion people, and an estimated prevalence of hearing loss of somewhere between 5.9% and 16.5%, depending on which definition you use, India has a significant number of hearing impaired individuals. They are served...
Prof Furness in this article rounds up the steps and leaps being made by the scientific community to develop therapies to support, rejuvenate and / or replace the cochlear structures. David’s electron microscope images of the cochlear structures are world...
Often the first question following the diagnosis of a hearing loss is ‘why?’ In this article Ali Danesh explores the advances made in uncovering ‘why’ from a genetics perspective. Ali describes the panel of genetic tests now commercially available to...
A team at the University of Southampton have been funded by the Ministry of Defence to investigate how to improve the assessment of auditory fitness for duty in the UK Armed Forces. Matt Blyth talks us through the current methods...
What is the current evidence for medical management of sudden sensorineural hearing loss? Jessica Choong and Stephen O’Leary present a review of the current evidence of treatments options. Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) causes significant distress and, in many cases,...
Where are we in our search for a hearing restoration grail? Nicola Robas leads us through the map pieces discovered in creating a pharmaceutical answer to hearing loss and tinnitus. Together, hearing loss and tinnitus affect over one in six...
Intuitively, as health professionals, we know that universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) makes sense. Bolajoko Olusanya outlines how UNHS fits in with global health priorities, as well as illustrating how such programmes can help to deliver additional benefits to communities....
The World Health Assembly recently adopted a resolution on hearing loss. In this article Shelly Chadha and Alarcos Cieza outline how the resolution came to be and how the World Health Organization and its partners plan to implement it. The...
Marie Wardle is the Programme Director of the Interpersonal Therapy department in the West Midlands, UK and part of her role is to deliver supervision training courses for therapists in the region. Therapists, whether supporting patients with psychological or physical...
Modern architecture can use scientific techniques to shape room acoustics and create great sounding places. Professor Trevor Cox discusses our ancestors’ understanding of the importance of building techniques to enhance acoustics from Stonehenge to a Symphony Hall. Going to an...
A detailed look at the pathogenesis of acquired hearing loss due to exposure to ototoxicity during pregnancy or shortly after birth. Insights from genomic medicine have shown that, along with environmental factors causing epigenetic alterations, hearing loss may be caused...
Many of us will have been stuck with an ‘earworm’ for a day but consider how it would be to have that earworm stuck on repeat, possibly forever. Drs Lauw, Blom and Coebergh review the current literature on musical hallucinations...