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Kallmann’s Syndrome

‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ (Shakespeare) Kallmann’s Syndrome (KS), or hereditary hypogonadal anosmia, is a rare genetic disorder characterised by delayed or absent puberty and anosmia. It is named after Franz Kallmann, but he was...

Questionnaires to measure tinnitus severity

The handicap associated with tinnitus can arise from any combination of stress, anxiety, depression, emotional distress, insomnia, difficulties concentrating, or impairments in quality of life or everyday functioning. Measuring such handicap and determining clinical need is therefore far from trivial....

SEQaBOO: SEQuencing a Baby for an Optimal Outcome

There are at least 15 countries now running genome sequencing projects. The team in Manchester, UK, and Boston, USA, share their SEQaBOO project. Abstract SEQaBOO (SEQuencing a Baby for an Optimal Outcome) will transform newborn hearing screening (NBHS) by bringing...

Genetics and the newborn hearing screen: the future is now

Eliot Shearer shares the progress being made with newborn hearing screening 60 years on from where it started, and future directions for identifying hearing loss using physiologic, genetic and cCMV screening. Newborn screening had its birth in the early 1960s,...

Innovative approaches to treating deafness

Shahar Taiber and Karen Avraham give us a summary of gene therapies for hearing loss, with an overview of limitations and what the future holds. Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder. The last two decades have seen a...

Seven things ENT surgeons can learn from the hairdressers

In a nod to our origins as barber surgeons, Australian ENT surgeon and blogger Eric Levi gives us an entertaining insight into what he has learned from his hairdresser that makes him a better doctor. I’ve been to the hairdressers...

Optimising hearing aid processing for music appreciation

Hearing aid manufacturers’ main focus has, up until recently, been improvement of speech intelligibility. Today’s hearing aid users have much broader demands however and often cite improved music perception as a key outcome or goal. Drs Tish Ramirez and Rebecca...

Innovation in medical product technologies

There is a point in all innovation projects where the clinician has exhausted their knowledge and needs expert help to create a prototype. Mark Prince, Design Engineer, discusses this phase of the project and how engineers’ analytical thinking brings a...

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...

Leadership in healthcare

There is often a great deal of confusion over the words ‘management’ and ‘leadership’. Sometimes they are used interchangeably. Sometimes they are used to represent opposite ends of a spectrum. Sometimes both are used as collective nouns, or to describe an activity.