Journal Reviews
X-ray vs. intraoperative testing for determining cochlear implant placement
Most cochlear implant centres confirm electrode position after surgery using X-rays to ensure optimal electrode placement. As well as transorbital view X-rays, this team check placement using impedance measures and neural response telemetry (NRT) performed intraoperatively. The former indicates whether...
Your voice and your personality
Variations of vocal effort are a normal adaptation to difficult communication situations. However, persistence of these abnormal strategies can lead to various functional dysphonias. In this experiment, the authors tested 41 females aged 18-52. The subjects were asked to instruct...
Chronic rhinitis endotypes
Chronic rhinitis (CR) is common with up to 30% of the population affected, with a significant impact on quality of life. CR includes several phenotypes with different pathogenesis including allergy, autoimmune, age, occupation, pregnancy, neurogenic and drugs. Such variation means...
Which cross-over frequency is best for electro-acoustic stimulation?
Advances in technology and improved soft surgical techniques have led to individuals with better hearing thresholds, especially at the low frequencies, becoming candidates for cochlear implants (CI). Surgeons are more confident that residual hearing can be preserved thus making those...
Cochlear implants and speech perception
Cochlear implants can be an effective treatment for specific hearing losses. They may often be the only way to restore hearing for profoundly deaf people. Therefore, it is very important to understand all processes that may influence effective fitting of...
Understanding osseointegration for the otologist
Bone conduction implants are hearing devices that require osseointegration to create a stable and reliable interface between the hearing device and the skull to deliver sound to the cochlea. This article reviews the physiology of osseointegration, factors that may lead...
Auditory deprivation and single-sided deafness
In cases of bilateral auditory deprivation, there is clear evidence of an inverse relationship between performance after cochlear implantation and the length of severe to profound deafness prior to implantation (i.e. the longer the deprivation the poorer the outcome on...
The role of cVEMPs in the diagnosis of Meniere’s disease
This study sets out to determine the most useful metrics to use from cervical-vestibular evoked myogenic potential (c-VEMP) tests when the diagnosis of Meniere’s disease (MD) is unclear, or as a follow-up tool. It is known that cVEMPs can detect...
Listening effort and speech perception performance
Capturing speech perception performance in noisy listening environments is a key part in validating any hearing instrument. Traditionally audiologists have always measured this performance in noisy environments by looking at thresholds, i.e. speech reception thresholds or signal to noise ratios....
The paediatric dilemma of one ear in and one ear out of NICE criteria
The auditory implant team in Manchester have implanted a cohort of children where audiological thresholds meet the NICE guidance for cochlear implantation (CI) in one ear only, and the other falls into moderate, severe or sloping loss. These children are...
From a dysphagia clinical trial to a multidisciplinary head and neck clinical pathway – the road to implementation
This paper describes the barriers and facilitators to establishing a structured and coordinated multidisciplinary care pathway for patients with head and neck cancer at a medical centre in the USA. The initiative was set in motion by the roll out...
A trial of house dust mite sublingual tablet in children with allergic rhinitis
The house dust mite (HDM) is one of the commonest causative agents in allergic rhinitis (AR), affecting patients across all demographics. Recently, sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) has been shown in clinical trials and meta-analysis to be effective compared to placebo in...
