Audiology features
Intratympanic treatments for subjective idiopathic tinnitus
Direct application of medication into the ear is long established, going back as far as written records. In the modern era, greater understanding of aural anatomy revealed that drugs instilled in the middle ear could potentially diffuse into the cochlea...
Drawing pictures and telling stories: treating tinnitus in childhood
There is increasing awareness that tinnitus is not restricted to adults. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that some experience of tinnitus in children is fairly common [1]. For many, tinnitus has little effect and requires limited or no intervention. For...
Selecting and optimising hearing aids for tinnitus benefit: a rough guide
Hearing aids have a relatively long history as tinnitus treatment tools. Saltzman and Ersner reported success in suppressing tinnitus with simple hearing aids in a number of cases as early as 1947 [1]. In an early comprehensive approach to tinnitus...
Mindfulness based approaches to tinnitus management: meditations on a new approach
Psychological approaches to tinnitus There is now widespread agreement that an individual’s interpretation of tinnitus can determine how distressing they find it. If tinnitus is regarded as non-threatening then habituation normally follows. If, however, tinnitus is interpreted as threatening, habituation...
Are we making progress on tinnitus?
One of the aspects of tinnitus that drew me into it becoming a major theme of my clinical and research work was how little work had been done when I began to see patients in the mid 1980s. This struck...
What do animal models tell us about tinnitus and hyperacusis?
Do animals have tinnitus? The obvious question to ask is: do animals have tinnitus? It is known that tinnitus is a conscious percept and as such affected by attention and not audible during sleep. For it to be demonstrated that...
Hearing care systems – European examples
In this article, Vice President of the European Federation of Hard of Hearing, Lidia Best, explores the drivers for improvement and change in European hearing care systems. In 2010, the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) issued the EN-15927 European Standard...
Universal newborn hearing screening: a global health perspective
Intuitively, as health professionals, we know that universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) makes sense. Bolajoko Olusanya outlines how UNHS fits in with global health priorities, as well as illustrating how such programmes can help to deliver additional benefits to communities....
Plasticity with cochlear implants: individual factors in the outcomes
Andrej Kral gives us an overview of neuronal plasticity in congenital hearing loss, and discusses why it is core to our clinical interventions in hearing loss and rehabilitation. The brain is born immature and undergoes extensive shaping during early development....
Fifteen years of vestibular implant research in humans
Implants: it’s all in the balance! Prof Guyot and his team give us an update on their research in addressing bilateral vestibular deficits via an implant. Doctors are often unaware that people, even young, may lose vestibular function on both...
Central auditory changes in SNHL
Robert Harrison discusses some of the most obvious ways in which cochlear hearing loss has central consequences. It is convenient to classify hearing loss according to the most obvious site of lesion, for example, conductive, cochlear, retro-cochlear, or central hearing...
The future of inner ear drug delivery
The techniques for delivering drugs to the inner ear system are evolving. Jeffrey Harris considers the myths, the facts and the potential for drug delivery innovations and how they can improve tomorrow’s hearing outcomes. The inner ear’s delicate membranous structure,...
