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How do mermaids hear?

When the imagery of childhood fairy tales meets the more clinically analytical mind of an adult, there may at some point come the question, ‘how do mermaids hear’? Luckily a department of biology in Denmark has sought to furnish such...

Double layer graft in endoscopic tympanoplasty

This Turkish retrospective study looked at the success rates following endoscopic tympanoplasty using the double layer graft technique. This involves using a tragal cartilage and perichondrium composite graft and a separate perichondrial graft for closure of the perforation. The crescent...

Round window niche drilling with intratympanic for ISSHL. A new option for salvage?

This paper from China compares the technique of widening the round window via a posterior tympanotomy approach and steroid-soaked gelatin sponge with intratympanic steroids alone for salvage therapy in severe idiopathic sensorineural hearing loss. Salvage therapy was defined as patients...

Semantic fluency test to investigate deaf children

Semantic fluency task (SFT) is used to measure lexical organisation and executive function across the lifespan and requires participants to name examples from a particular semantic category in a specific period of time. Using this test, the authors investigated a...

Lack of early vocabulary growth in bilateral cochlear implant children

Studies indicate that children with unilateral implantation may have delayed vocabulary development for long periods of time even after implantation. This Finnish study attempted to find out whether bilateral cochlear implantation was associated with earlier vocabulary development. The authors analysed...

Cochlear implantation in children with cognitive disabilities

Additional disabilities are frequently encountered in children born with hearing loss or deafness. A study from Denmark attempted to systematically review to what extent hearing-impaired children with cognitive disabilities benefit from cochlear implantation. The authors conducted an extensive search in...

Predicting speech recognition in adults with cochlear implants

This was a combined prospective and retrospective study from Belgium that looked at factors influencing speech recognition scores in quiet conditions (retrospectively) and speech reception threshold levels (SRT) in fixed noise conditions (prospectively) after cochlear implantation in postlingually deaf adults....

Day care stapes surgery

This paper reports on a proposed unblinded, randomised controlled trial in which the hearing outcomes after inpatient stapes surgery will be compared with those after day case stapes surgery. The study is currently in the recruitment stage and plans to...

CT guided cochlear implant programming improves performance

There is currently no national (UK) consensus on imaging patients for cochlear implantation. This paper may change that. It has shown increased hearing and quality of life in paediatric cochlear implant (CI) users when the programming has been assisted by...

What are the non-inflammatory causes of a conductive loss?

This retrospective study looked at patients with an intact tympanic membrane with non-inflammatory causes – i.e. otitis media and cholesteotoma. They document their findings based on exploratory tympanotomy. They operated depending on the findings with either a stapedectomy or a...

Auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder

This is a concise summary of auditory neuropathy and current knowledge of the disorder through review of a recently published article. The terminology of this hearing disorder implies the site of the lesion is neural; however the characteristic electrophysical signature...