Audiology features
Clinical WG1. Establishing a standard for tinnitus: patient assessment and characterisation
Rilana Cima and Haúla Haider introduce an ambitious pan-European collaboration that seeks to establish guidelines for achieving best clinical practice for managing, assessing and treating patients with different tinnitus profiles. Tinnitus heterogeneity is the major reason for inconsistent results in...
Database WG2. The Tinnitus Patient Database in the TINNET COST Action BM1306
Berthold Langguth describes an innovative project that is creating the world’s largest multi-national patient database containing standardised information on tinnitus and medical history, otological examination and psycho-acoustic measures of tinnitus. A challenge for tinnitus treatment and tinnitus research is the...
Neuroimaging WG3. Neuroimaging as a window on the heterogeneity of tinnitus
Pim van Dijk and Sven Vanneste describe the hope that brain imaging techniques used for research will provide a better understanding of the heterogeneity of tinnitus through large-scale analysis. Their project will create a procedure whereby researchers can submit their...
Genetics WG4. Improving diagnosis and drug development through the genetic understanding of tinnitus subtypes: a TINNET endeavour
Christopher R Cederroth and Jose Antonio Lopez-Escamez explain how progress is being made to investigate the contribution of genetic factors to tinnitus, including a subtype of ‘extreme’ tinnitus in Ménière’s disease. Genetics WG4 is working towards determining the genetic basis...
Outcome measurements WG5. Developing a core outcome set of measures for tinnitus
Alain Londero presents a large-scale collaboration that invites clinicians and patients to develop a minimum standard for assessing the efficacy of tinnitus treatments. This will become an international recommendation for all clinical trials of tinnitus. WG5 is working towards a...
Conspiring together: tinnitus and hearing loss
In this special feature, Nic Wray of the British Tinnitus Association and Zheng Yen Ng of The Ear Foundation present the results of their report into managing tinnitus for people with hearing loss. In September 2015, the British Tinnitus Association...
Rotational chair testing: “To rotate, or not to rotate, that is the real question”
Passive whole body rotation tests are widely considered to be the ‘gold standard’ for the identification of bilateral peripheral vestibular disorders (bPVD), but also have a part to play in identifying unilateral disorders (uPVD). In this article Paul Radomskij discusses...
Clinical utility and practical interpretation of the video head impulse test
The head impulse test (HIT) is an essential bedside test to detect peripheral vestibular deficits. The video head impulse test (vHIT) is a new tool quantifying the HIT. In this article Maria Heuberger and colleagues point out the clinical utility...
Using psychological behaviour change theory in vestibular practice
Fiona Barker explains the importance of recognising and understanding how habitual behaviours in vestibular patients can affect treatment outcomes, and how we as audiologists can support and encourage patients to modify these behaviours and perhaps address our own professional behaviours...
Vestibular rehabilitation therapy: diagnosis based strategies
In his second article on this topic (see here for the first article), Richard E Gans explains how to use vestibular rehabilitation therapy to treat vestibular patients, and demonstrates why this method of diagnosis based strategies has proved so successful....
Aetiology, investigation and acute management of sudden sensorineural hearing loss
The cause of a single sided sensorineural hearing loss has a wide variety of aetiologies. This review, by Edwin Halliday, looks specifically at the differential diagnostic causes of a sudden sensorineural hearing loss, the relevant investigations and the management should...
Audiological and psychological consequences of single-sided deafness
The loss of sound input from one ear has a significant impact on our perception of our acoustic environment. This impact is compounded in adverse listening conditions. Rachel Knappett’s article explores the audiological impact of this hearing loss and the...
