BACKGROUND Hearing impairment (HI) in the elderly may be a risk factor for psychosis, but associations between HI and psychotic disorder or psychotic experiences have been reported more consistently in younger than in older populations. The aims of this study were to replicate the positive association between hearing impairment and psychotic experiences and to clarify any differences between gr...

Abstract Background Hearing loss/deafness is a common otological disorder found in the Pakistani population due to high prevalence of consanguineous unions, but full range genetic causes still unknown. Methods A large kindred with hearing loss was studied. Whole-exome sequencing and Sanger were performed search for candidate gene underlying disease phenotype. minigene assay reverse transcriptio...

Hearing loss is an etiologically heterogeneous trait with differences in the age of onset, severity and site of lesion. It is caused by a combination of genetic and/or environmental factors. A longitudinal study to examine the efficacy of early intervention for improving child outcomes is ongoing in Australia. To determine the cause of hearing loss in these children we undertook molecular testi...

Under normal hearing conditions, comparisons of the sounds reaching each ear are critical for accurate sound localization. Asymmetric hearing loss should therefore degrade spatial hearing and has become an important experimental tool for probing the plasticity of the auditory system, both during development and adulthood. In clinical populations, hearing loss affecting one ear more than the oth...

The goals of this study were to estimate the risk for lowered speech-language outcomes associated with early recurrent otitis media with effusion (OME) with and without hearing loss and to develop a preliminary descriptive-explanatory model for the findings. Three statistical approaches were used to assess associations among OME, hearing loss, and speech-language outcomes. Participants were a s...

Memory processes could account for a significant part of the variance in language performances of hearing-impaired children. However, the circumstance in which the performance of hearing-impaired children can be nearly the same as the performance of hearing children remains relatively little studied. Thus, a group of pre-school children with congenital, bilateral hearing loss and a group of pre...

INTRODUCTION Chronic otitis media (COM), a persistent and durable inflammation and infection of the middle ear, is a common disorder. Alterations in the contralateral ear in sufferers have been observed in recent years. Because only a few studies have been reported in this area, we performed this study in order to assess alterations in the contralateral ear of patients with COM. MATERIALS AND...