In centrally related hearing loss, there is no apparent damage in the auditory system, but the patient is unable to hear sounds. In patients with cortical hearing loss (and in the absence of communication deficit, either total or partial, as in agnosia or aphasia), some attention-related or language-based disorders may lead to a wrong diagnosis of hearing impairment. The authors present two pat...

Clinical vignette: A 51-year-old man with right-sided sudden hearing loss presents to the otology clinic. He has a 4-year history of episodic vertigo of several hours’ duration and fluctuating, progressive sensorineural hearing loss in his left ear. The vertigo attacks have not occurred for the last 18 months, and the left ear hearing is consistently poor. The patient’s right ear hearing has dr...

BACKGROUND Idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSHL) and tinnitus are common. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) may improve hearing loss and/or reduce the intensity of tinnitus. METHODS We performed a systematic search of the literature for randomized controlled trials, and made pooled analyses of pre-determined clinical outcomes where possible. RESULTS Six trials contributed to t...

Clinical vignette: A 51-year-old man with right-sided sudden hearing loss presents to the otology clinic. He has a 4-year history of episodic vertigo of several hours' duration and fluctuating, progressive sensorineural hearing loss in his left ear. The vertigo attacks have not occurred for the last 18 months, and the left ear hearing is consistently poor. The patient's right ear hearing has dr...

UNLABELLED Tympanoplasty is done to eradicate ear pathology and to restore the conductive hearing mechanism (eardrum and ossicles). Some patients, however, do not tolerate tinnitus and question physicians about the results of surgery when tinnitus persists. AIM to evaluate the progression of tinnitus in patients with conductive hearing loss after tympanoplasty. STUDY DESIGN a prospective co...

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the use of hearing health care services (hearing testing and hearing aids) by adults aged 21 to 84 years. METHODS Hearing was tested and medical and hearing health histories were obtained as part of the Beaver Dam Offspring Study between 2005 and 2008 (n = 3285, mean age = 49 years). RESULTS Of the cohort, 34% (55% of participants aged ≥ 70 years) had a hearing test ...

Wireless synchronization of the digital signal processing (DSP) features between two hearing aids in a bilateral hearing aid fitting is a fairly new technology. This technology is expected to preserve the differences in time and intensity between the two ears by co-ordinating the bilateral DSP features such as multichannel compression, noise reduction, and adaptive directionality. The purpose o...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine if patient characteristics or clinical variables could predict who benefits from individual auditory training. METHOD A retrospective series of analyses were performed using a data set from a large, multisite, randomized controlled clinical trial that compared the treatment effects of at-home auditory training programs in bilateral hearing ai...

It is well known that communication in noisy environments with reverberation present is a difficult problem to solve, particularly for the hearing-impaired listener. Two-microphone noise cancelling using an LMS adaptive filter in real time was used to process speech recorded in the presence of speech-spectrum noise at six different signal-to-noise ratios, -8, -4, 0, 4, 8, and 12 dB. Twelve norm...