Journal Reviews
Quality of life in adolescence
Adolescence can be a difficult time and the added complexity of a hearing loss can exacerbate feelings during this period. In the literature, there are mixed findings that show while some children with hearing loss score poorly on some aspects...
The effects of paediatric tracheostomy
Paediatric tracheostomy is usually an essential procedure to preserve life, or to allow a patient to function in the community. However, the effect of tracheostomy on the developing child - care requirements, lack of voice, impaired swallow, constant risk of...
A global survey of tracheostomy healthcare provision and patient participation: requirements for improvement
Patients with tracheostomy require comprehensive care which should begin in the preoperative phase and go through immediate postoperative and discharge phases with patient involvement as well. The authors assessed this with a multicentre, cross-sectional survey using a mailing list held...
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....
Long-term voice outcomes following transoral laser surgery versus radiotherapy for early laryngeal cancers
The oncological outcomes of transoral laser microsurgery (TOLM) for early laryngeal cancers are well-known to be very similar to radiation therapy (RT). The functional outcomes associated with each treatment modality are therefore of significant interest. This study is reported to...
Centralisation of care for acoustic tumour surgeries?
Several factors are responsible for readmission after acoustic tumour removal. The authors retrospectively studied the association between hospital, patient and insurance factors with the rate of readmission following acoustic tumour removal in the United States using the Nationwide Readmission Database...
Nasal disease and quality of life in athletes
Rhinitis is a nasal condition which is generally underappreciated in primary care and even less in athletes. In this study, the authors specify nasal symptoms constituting rhinitis as nasal blockage, sneezing bouts, rhinorrhoea and itching and compare their prevalence in...
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...
Are there benefits of prophylactic swallowing exercises for patients with head and neck cancer?
This randomised controlled trial aimed to establish the impact of prophylactic swallowing exercises in patients undergoing chemoradiation therapy for head and neck cancer. The primary outcome was the functional oral intake scale (FOIS), although secondary measures for feeding tube use,...
How useful is AHI?
There is a growing unease in the sleep medicine world about the usefulness of the apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI). Most of our objective evidence about obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is in some way related to the AHI, and the respiratory physicians...
Do implants assist rehabilitation following mandibular reconstruction?
When undertaking mandibular reconstruction, optimal function and aesthetic rehabilitation is the goal. There is no doubt that patients consider chewing, swallowing and speech to be of paramount importance. Following surgery, suboptimal rehabilitation leads to a fall in quality of life...
Day care stapes surgery
This paper reports on a proposed unblinded, randomised controlled trial in which the hearing outcomes after inpatient stapes surgery will be compared with those after day case stapes surgery. The study is currently in the recruitment stage and plans to...
