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Ageing Ears

How do our ears show our age? We are all aware of the concept of presbycusis and a plethora of other events that impact our hearing over the passage of time. We are familiar with the standard subjective testing, though...

Impact of Covid-19 on secretory otitis media (SOM) in terms of rate of intervention, effusion detected intraoperatively and seasonal variation

It is widely known that secretory otitis media (SOM) has seasonal variations. In well-judged cases, there is middle ear effusion found at the time of surgery. In this retrospective study, the authors have tried to assess if Covid-19 changed these...

Lonely, so lonely

The pandemic has evidenced the negative mental and physical health outcomes that are associated with isolation and loneliness. This study was undertaken in Australia, where one quarter of the population live alone. Giving our ageing population worldwide, the number of...

Not to be underestimated

Equipment may differ, formulas and hearing aids alter, but I am in agreement with what this article points out: the test box can be considered a vastly under-used and under-appreciated piece of equipment. It can provide an alternative verification for...

Cascading communication skills to help children with autism

Inadequate workforce resource is an ongoing difficulty across the health professions. This study proposes a train the trainer model, with the ultimate goal of improving the communication skills of children with autism. The study describes an intervention called naturalistic developmental...

Hearing impairment awareness in primary school teachers

Early intervention of hearing loss is crucial in school-age children to avoid delay in development of communication, cognition, language and social skills. Teachers play a crucial role in identification and support in cases of progressive or late-onset hearing loss. Using...

Demonstrating unobservable effects of therapy through PROMS: a review

Ultimately, healthcare should meet the needs of the people it is designed for. One way of measuring this is using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMS). These tools capture the patient’s perspective and have been described as demonstrating the unobservable effects of...

Hot off the press: new clinically relevant research methodologies for speech and language therapy

Interpretive Description (ID) is a qualitative research framework developed to address the limitations in other qualitative methods that are not epistemologically able to take applied fields, such as clinical professions, into consideration. This framework, often described as a method, has...

Does frailty lead to changes on quantitative measures of videofluoroscopic swallowing assessment?

In recent years, studies have considered the relationship between frailty and swallowing and demonstrated that decreased skeletal muscle mass correlates with decreased swallowing function. This study investigated this relationship by using quantitative measurement of three individual components of swallowing assessed...