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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...

Alternobaric vertigo: asymmetrical vestibular function due to asymmetrical middle ear pressures (Iron Man’s archenemy)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe could certainly be deemed an ‘extreme environment’ and yet very rarely do we see the Avenger’s popping to the clinic for a check-up. Hee-Young Kim has wondered how they cope with extreme pressure changes and discusses...

Role of interventional neuroradiology in otorhinolarygological pathology 
– a brief review

Introduction Since its advent in 1964 when Dotter percutaneously dilated a stenosed femoral artery [1], interventional radiology has undergone tremendous advancement in both imaging and devices that have enabled the operator (interventional radiologist) to access very distal small vasculature and...

Machine learning and the future of otolaryngology

If you are over 30 years of age, you have witnessed a technology revolution that has grossly affected how we live: computers have come from being an oddity to an everyday feature in our households and places of work; the...

Multi-channel cochlear implants: past, present and future

Forty years since the first multi-channel devices were implanted, who better than Ingeborg Hochmair, who has been a key figure throughout their evolution, to offer her thoughts on the past, present and future of multi-channel cochlear implants? Read on for...

Mind the gap – developing a sustainable pipeline for hearing therapeutics

In this article, the authors describe three key challenges faced in developing hearing therapeutics. Collaboration between companies, sectors and disciplines will be key to finding solutions. The unmet need for therapies for hearing loss grows apace, with prevalence rising across...

Semi implantable bone conduction devices: challenges and developments

Bone conduction mechanisms and history of bone conduction aids Bone conduction hearing devices work by stimulating hair cells via the bone conduction hearing pathways. These pathways are less well understood than the air conduction pathways, but recent research has shown...

Clinical leadership and management: developing world ENT

I have been asked to share some of the initiatives I have been involved with to address ENT-related challenges in Africa and the developing world. Developing countries constitute the majority of the world’s landmass (Figure 1), are home to >50%...

Giacomo Puccini’s laryngeal cancer

Giacomo Puccini, one of the best known composers of all time, was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and died from the disease in 1924. In this article, Rosario Marchese-Ragona and Alessandro Martini describe Puccini’s experience of the disease with quotes from...

By the people, for the people: a multidisciplinary facial nerve clinic with a difference

Facial nerve palsy is regularly seen in ENT clinics. Underlying diagnoses are excluded, and the patient is often then discharged to ‘see how it goes’, with or without an ophthalmology referral. Here, Catherine Meller describes how she and her team...

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...