Search

Developing medical devices for children: opportunities and challenges

The development of medical devices for infants and children lags significantly behind the development of devices for adults. While in the United States the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set up incentives for developing child age-specific pharmaceuticals, there is...

Specialist teams deliver world-class trauma care

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust runs the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, which is a designated Major Trauma Centre. The Trust holds the contract to treat all UK injured military personnel evacuated from combat zones overseas. More than 1200 of...

Hidden genetic disorders in children that may present to the otolaryngologist

Background Among the many hundreds of children presenting to the otolaryngology clinic are a few whose symptoms are due to an underlying genetic condition. In most cases the underlying syndrome is obvious and has already been diagnosed, such as the...

Hearing rehabilitation after vestibular schwannoma surgery

Hearing rehabilitation is a key focus of the management of patients with vestibular schwannoma. But how do we rehabilitate hearing when the cochlear nerve has been damaged by tumour, irradiation, or resective surgery? Mathieu Trudel, Scott Rutherford and Simon Lloyd...

Active middle ear implants and bone-anchored hearing systems

The implantable hearing device market has grown significantly over recent years. But as conventional hearing aids improve and cochlear implant candidacy widens, what is the role for active middle ear implants and bone anchored hearing systems, and how should we...

By the people, for the people: a multidisciplinary facial nerve clinic with a difference

Facial nerve palsy is regularly seen in ENT clinics. Underlying diagnoses are excluded, and the patient is often then discharged to ‘see how it goes’, with or without an ophthalmology referral. Here, Catherine Meller describes how she and her team...

IFOS 2021: imagining inspirational continuing professional development

If you expect a virtual presentation to be the same as an in-person presentation, just without the live person in front of you, then you have no imagination. Irrespective of the challenges facing us currently with meeting in person during...

Intratympanic steroids in Ménière's disease: what’s the evidence?

The days of drastic surgery for Ménière's disease are long gone. We know that intratympanic injections can deliver high doses of medication to the inner ear with minimal discomfort and minimal risk. But how do we choose from the myriad...

What does functional neuroimaging tell us about tinnitus?

One of the most common causes of tinnitus is noise exposure, be that either cumulative day-to-day exposure over a lifetime or experience of acute noise trauma such as a loud concert or shooting incident. Observational data indicate that up to...

A psychophysical perspective on single-sided deafness and its treatment by cochlear implants

Bob Carlyon gives us a psychophysical perspective on the hearing benefits that can and cannot be achieved for patients with single-sided deafness with a cochlear implant, and discusses some of the challenges in maximising the effectiveness of the treatment. He...

Audiovestibular findings in children with enlarged vestibular aqueduct

Enlarged vestibular aqueduct is reported to affect up to 15% of the paediatric population with sensorineural hearing loss. Devin McCaslin and Bridget Smith provide an up-to-date overview of the mechanisms and clinical symptoms underlying the condition and share some of...

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....