Tinnitus, a phantom auditory sensation, is associated with hearing loss in most cases, but it is unclear if hearing loss causes tinnitus. Phantom auditory sensations can be induced in normal hearing listeners when they experience severe auditory deprivation such as confinement in an anechoic chamber, which can be regarded as somewhat analogous to a profound bilateral hearing loss. As this condi...

Among the hazardous factors in the workplace, noise is one of the most difficult to eliminate because enclosure or reduction of its source is often infeasible. This may underlie the fact that many workers are exposed to noise and develop hearing problems. For instance, in Japan, in the year 2000 alone, at least 208,000 workers were exposed to noise and more than 36,000 (17%) of them were found ...

Try this simple experiment one day: wear a couple of earplugs and try to conduct your regular everyday activities, for a couple of hours. How would you describe your feelings in that deafened state? You would probably feel a sense of isolation, from the world and from other people. So, absence of sound induces perceived isolation which may turn into felt oppression in some environments, such as...

Background: Sleep deprivation is common in critically ill patients in intensive care unit (ICU). It can result in delirium, difficult weaning, repeated nosocomial infections, prolonged ICU length of stay and increased ICU mortality. Melatonin, a physiological sleep regulator, is well known to benefit sleep quality of certain people, but evidence for effectiveness in ICU sleep disturbance is sti...

Background: Sleep deprivation is common in critically ill patients in intensive care units (ICU). It can result in delirium, difficulty weaning, repeated nosocomial infections, prolonged ICU length of stay and increased ICU mortality. Melatonin, a physiological sleep regulator, is well known to benefit sleep quality in certain people, but evidence for the effectiveness in ICU sleep disturbance ...

In comparison with the mandatory noise reduction rating (NRR) testing of every hearing protector sold in the United States, real-world tests of hearing protector attenuation are scarce. This study evaluated data from three potential field-test methods as compared with the subject-fit data from Method B of ANSI S12.6-1997 for the E.A.R(R) Express trade mark Pod Plug trade mark. The new field-tes...

Current exposure limits for high intensity impulse noise contain factors for hearing protection which are based on very limited data. Recent studies in the U.S. and in France have provided new insights into the protection afforded by hearing protective devices. For impulses with an Aduration of approximately 3.0 ms, protection was found to be adequate for peak pressures up to 190 dB SPL for 6 i...

Abstract Introduction Patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) are subject to multiple necessary diagnostic and therapeutic interventions throughout course of their treatment that contribute sleep deprivation. These measures increase ambient noise, impacting patient morbidity mortality by exacerbating confusion, ICU-related delirium, recovery time, long term sequelae associated with Post-Inten...

Plasticity of myelination represents a mechanism to tune the flow of information by balancing functional requirements with metabolic and spatial constraints. The auditory system is heavily myelinated and operates at the upper limits of action potential generation frequency and speed observed in the mammalian CNS. This study aimed to characterize the development of myelin within the trapezoid bo...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The ability to localize a sound source is one of the binaural hearing benefits in a horizontal plane based on interaural time difference and interaural intensity difference. Unilateral or bilateral asymmetric hearing loss will affect binaural hearing and lead to sound locating errors. In this cross sectional analytical descriptive study, the localization error was inve...