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History of ENT - Murder most foul, strange and unnatural

Hamlet written by William Shakespeare at the very beginning of the 17th century has definite otological interest. The whole play is about young Prince Hamlet’s revenge for his father’s murder. The king is killed by Hamlet’s wicked uncle, who then...

A soprano’s demise: a cautionary tale for the thyroid surgeon

Prior to the mid-19th century, thyroid surgery was considered excessively dangerous. The emergence of anaesthetic, antisepsis and improved instrumentation, however, increased its feasibility and frequency in Europe. The unhurried, judiciously antiseptic and haemostatic approach, advocated by Kocher, was popularised and...

Combined use of a hearing aid and a cochlear implant: a case study

When multi-channel cochlear implants (CIs) were first introduced in the 1980s, their use was restricted to people who derived no benefit from conventional amplification. Over the past three decades, however, the criteria for CIs has been relaxed considerably, and it...

Hearing care systems in Europe – can we do more?

52 million Europeans experience hearing loss but many don’t find their way to professional hearing care. Lidia Best looks at strategies to improve the uptake of amplification at a national level [1]. With rising numbers of people experiencing hearing loss,...

Hearables: in-ear sensing devices for recording of physiological signals

Colver Ken Howe Ne, Jameel Muzaffar and Manohar Bance discuss the potential of hearable systems to monitor physiological signals (e.g. from brain or heart, blood pressure, body temperature) unobtrusively. Such adaptations require high-quality sensors and sophisticated de-noising signal processing on...

Hearing in middle-age: hearing impairment, tinnitus and hearing aid use in UK adults

Hearing loss has a well-documented adverse impact on emotional, social and physical well-being. In this article, Dr Piers Dawes from the University of Manchester gives an insight into his team’s recent work analysing the very large UK Biobank data set,...

Leadership in academia

I went into medicine with the clichéd view of wanting to help people. I found that by doing surgery I could help a small number of people, albeit usually to a large effect. Then, I recognised that by engaging in...

Patient and public involvement in research

One step further from involving patients in setting research priorities is to involve them in the planning and recruitment stages of the subsequent trials and studies. Here, Carl Philpott and Aneeka Degun explain the concept of Patient and Public Involvement...

Why and what should hearing care professionals know about cognitive impairment and dementia

Good reasons to care about cognitive impairment and dementia in audiology If asking people what they fear most when getting to old age, it is cognitive decline that is named most often. This comes with the expectation of limitations in...

The role of significant others in hearing aid adoption

Presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, is one of the most common conditions affecting older adults and its prevalence is found to increase with age. Over the years, amplification technology has advanced significantly from analogue to digital signal processing. Despite this,...