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A place for everything and everything in its place: the practicalities of randomised clinical trials

Will this pill cure tinnitus? Bonnie Millar describes one trial that has investigated the possibility whilst describing the path of drug trials in the UK. Background In the last quarter of 2014, a clinical trial (QUIET-1; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02315508) commenced...

The role of public health in addressing age-related hearing loss

Prevention and treatment of hearing loss needs to be viewed through a public health lens, but what does that look like? Kelly Reavis and colleagues explain the steps to addressing hearing healthcare from a public health perspective and why this...

Precision and personalised genomic and epigenomic medicine in audiology/hearing loss

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...

Introduction to speech testing

Let’s get back to basics: Dr Schoepflin introduces the concepts behind speech testing for hearing care professionals. While pure tone threshold testing is considered the ‘gold standard’ for assessing auditory sensitivity, the results of pure tone testing provide only limited...

Effective and profitable provision of paediatric audiology care in the private sector

Similar to other specialty areas of hearing healthcare, paediatric audiology is a potential net loss for a private-sector, for-profit, business. Given the time-intensive needs of patients with cochlear implants, tinnitus and those who are under the age of 18 years...

Paediatric ENT trauma

Managing trauma in children often strikes terror in doctors who do not deal with children regularly. Kate Stephenson explains the approach to a child who has suffered ENT trauma and specific things to look for in children. ENT injuries are...

The role of metrics in studies of hearing and cognition

Introduction When perceiving sounds in real-world listening environments, older adults encounter several sources of degradation that can interfere with the perceptual process (Figure 1). Target signals (i.e. the sounds that a listener wants to focus on) have specific acoustic characteristics...

Fifteen years of vestibular implant research in humans

Implants: it’s all in the balance! Prof Guyot and his team give us an update on their research in addressing bilateral vestibular deficits via an implant. Doctors are often unaware that people, even young, may lose vestibular function on both...

Thyroid ultrasound elastography: does nodule stiffness predict malignancy?

Approximately 50% of the general population has a thyroid nodule while 5-15% of these are malignant [1]. A major challenge, therefore, is how to detect the malignant nodules for appropriate, timely treatment and avoid unnecessary, costly investigations for the remainder....