Peripheral vestibular loss in noise-exposed firefighters.

Introduction: Occupational workers are increasingly aware of the risk of noise overexposure to the auditory system but lack awareness about potential risks to the vestibular system. The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in vestibular end organ function in a known at-risk noise-exposed population, firefighters compared to age- and sex-matched controls using electrophysiologic measures of cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMP).

Methods: A cross-sectional observational study compared cVEMP response characteristics in 38 noise-exposed firefighters.

Recognizing a Mediastinal Mass: A Case of Primary Mediastinal Large B-Cell Lymphoma With Pruritus in a 23-Year-Old Adult Male Sailor.

Primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) is a rare, non-Hodgkin, B-cell lymphoma thought to originate from thymic B cells, which occurs primarily in young adults such as in the active duty population. Primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) presents as a large mediastinal mass, posing risks to the cardiopulmonary safety of patients and challenging the routine approach to diagnosis. We describe a case of a 23-year-old male sailor who presented to sick call on his ship while in port with shortness of breath, night sweats, 50-pound weight loss, and pruritic punched-out lesions on all extremities.

The effects of stimulus modality, task complexity, and cuing on working memory and the relationship with speech recognition in older cochlear implant users.

Introduction: The role of working memory (WM) in speech recognition of older cochlear implant (CI) users remains unclear. This study 1) examined the effects of aging and CI on WM performance across different modalities (auditory vs. visual) and cuing conditions, and 2) assessed how specific WM measures relate to sentence and word recognition in noise.

Psychoacoustic and Demographic Factors for Speech Recognition of Older Adult Cochlear Implant Users.

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the effects of aging and cochlear implant (CI) on psychoacoustic and speech recognition abilities and to assess the relative contributions of psychoacoustic and demographic factors to speech recognition of older CI (OCI) users. Method Twelve OCI users, 12 older acoustic-hearing (OAH) listeners age-matched to OCI users, and 12 younger normal-hearing (YNH) listeners underwent tests of temporal amplitude modulation detection, temporal gap detection in noise, and spectral-temporal modulated ripple discrimination. Speech reception thresholds were measured for sentence recognition in multitalker, speech-babble noise.