Can you start by telling me something about your own background? After my first degree in Psychology at Reading and a year doing other things, I went to Southampton to do the MSc in 1982. My first job after that...
The incidence rate of sporadic vestibular schwannoma (VS) has commonly been quoted as one in 100,000. However, since the advent of screening for asymmetrical hearing loss and increased availability of modern MRI scanning, more recent studies have shown the incidence...
Sensonics’ range of products provides the medical, scientific and industrial communities with reliable smell and taste tests for assessing chemosensory function.
Treatment of epilepsy can be considered generally as medical or surgical. Anti-epileptic drugs achieve a five-year seizure freedom in 54-70% patients. It is estimated that 50-90% of patients with drug-refractory epilepsy may not be candidates for resective surgery. For example,...
The difficulty in using the history and examination to determine the severity of sleep disordered breathing in children is well established. The relative prevalence of sleep disordered breathing symptoms in children, and the relative paucity of capacity and restrictive cost...
Untreated reflux can cause inflammation, scarring, narrowing and precancerous changes in the oesophagus and larynx, and may increase the risk of asthma and sleep apnoea.
The authors of this practical review paper highlight a growing issue within thyroid surgery, where high-quality ultrasound has increased the detection of subclinical nodules: what do we do with the patient presenting with an ‘incidental’ thyroid nodule? This has both...
Even though a ‘second look’ remains a gold standard for detection of residual cholesteatoma after intact canal wall techniques, non-echo-planar diffusion weighted MRI is considered a reasonable alternative to avoid further surgery. However, to establish or exclude a cholesteatoma de...
This paper describes another useful imaging technique to monitor Necrotising Otitis Externa (NOE). Echoplanar diffusion weighted magnetic resonance (DW MR) shows high signal on the ‘ADC map’ with active disease and this reduces in signal intensity as symptoms improve. This...
Chris Potter is a lad of the North West, and we see him here letting his bleach blond hair grow out to show us his Northern roots. When I was a lad, Manchester was a troubled city in apparent terminal...
The ability to assess detection and discrimination of speech by infants has proved elusive. Dr Iain Jackson and colleagues discuss how new technologies and fresh approaches might offer valuable insight into young infants’ behavioural responses to sound. The limits of...
Lulu Ritchie is a courageous and driven trainee in London, inspired by humanitarian missions but conscious of the usual requests for consultant level doctors. Lulu didn’t let that hold her back. She found a way and has kindly summarised her...