Do Modern Hearing Aids Meet ANSI Standards?

Background: The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) provides standards used to govern standardization of all hearing aids. If hearing aids do not meet specifications, there are potential negative implications for hearing aid users, professionals, and the industry. Recent literature has not investigated the proportion of new hearing aids in compliance with the ANSI specifications for quality control standards when they arrive in the clinic before dispensing.

Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy: The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL).

The Fifth Eriksholm Workshop on "Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy" was convened to develop a consensus among interdisciplinary experts about what is known on the topic, gaps in knowledge, the use of terminology, priorities for future research, and implications for practice. The general term cognitive energy was chosen to facilitate the broadest possible discussion of the topic. It goes back to who described the effects of attention on perception; he used the term psychic energy for the notion that limited mental resources can be flexibly allocated among perceptual and mental activities.

A Taxonomy of Fatigue Concepts and Their Relation to Hearing Loss.

Fatigue is common in individuals with a variety of chronic health conditions and can have significant negative effects on quality of life. Although limited in scope, recent work suggests persons with hearing loss may be at increased risk for fatigue, in part due to effortful listening that is exacerbated by their hearing impairment. However, the mechanisms responsible for hearing loss-related fatigue, and the efficacy of audiologic interventions for reducing fatigue, remain unclear.

Heritability of non-speech auditory processing skills.

Recent insight into the genetic bases for autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, stuttering, and language disorders suggest that neurogenetic approaches may also reveal at least one etiology of auditory processing disorder (APD). A person with an APD typically has difficulty understanding speech in background noise despite having normal pure-tone hearing sensitivity. The estimated prevalence of APD may be as high as 10% in the pediatric population, yet the causes are unknown and have not been explored by molecular or genetic approaches.

Speech Understanding in Children With Normal Hearing: Sound Field Normative Data for BabyBio, BKB-SIN, and QuickSIN.

Objective: The primary goal was to establish normative data for the Pediatric AzBio "BabyBio," QuickSIN, and BKB-SIN measures in the sound field for children with normal hearing.

Setting: Tertiary care hospital; cochlear implant (CI) program.

Patients: Forty-one children with normal hearing were recruited across four age groups (5-6, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-12 yr).

Salivary Cortisol Profiles of Children with Hearing Loss.

Objectives: It has long been speculated that effortful listening places children with hearing loss at risk for fatigue. School-age children with hearing loss experiencing cumulative stress and listening fatigue on a daily basis might undergo dysregulation of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity resulting in elevated or flattened cortisol profiles. The purpose of this study was to examine whether school-age children with hearing loss show different diurnal salivary cortisol patterns than children with normal hearing.

Hypertension, Diuretic Use, and Risk of Hearing Loss.

Background: Hearing loss is highly prevalent among adults in the United States. Hypertension also is common and often treated with diuretics. Hypertension may increase the risk of hearing loss by decreasing vascular supply to the stria vascularis.

Management of Children with Mild, Moderate, and Moderately Severe Sensorineural Hearing Loss.

Any degree of hearing loss can have a negative impact on child development. The amount of impact is largely determined by the type, quality, and timeliness of intervention. Early identification and management of hearing loss is essential for minimizing the impact of hearing loss and ensuring that children can reach their cognitive, linguistic, educational, and social potential.

Carotenoids, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and folate and risk of self-reported hearing loss in women.

Background: Higher intake of certain vitamins may protect against cochlear damage from vascular compromise and oxidative stress, thereby reducing risk of acquired hearing loss, but data are limited.

Objective: We prospectively examined the relation between carotenoids, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and folate intake and risk of self-reported hearing loss in women.

Design: This prospective cohort study followed 65,521 women in the Nurses' Health Study II from 1991 to 2009.

Subjective Ratings of Fatigue and Vigor in Adults With Hearing Loss Are Driven by Perceived Hearing Difficulties Not Degree of Hearing Loss.

Objectives: Anecdotal reports and qualitative research suggests that fatigue is a common, but often overlooked, accompaniment of hearing loss which negatively affects quality of life. However, systematic research examining the relationship between hearing loss and fatigue is limited. In this study, the authors examined relationships between hearing loss and various domains of fatigue and vigor using standardized and validated measures.

The Development of Conversation Training Therapy: A Concept Paper.

Objectives: To introduce the conceptual, theoretical, and practical foundations of a novel approach to voice therapy, called conversation training therapy (CTT), which focuses exclusively on voice awareness and efficient voice production in patient-driven conversational narrative, without the use of a traditional therapeutic hierarchy. CTT is grounded in motor learning theory, focused on training target voice goals in spontaneous, conversational speech in the first session and throughout. CTT was developed by a consensus panel of expert clinical voice-specialized speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and patients with voice problems.

Measurement and comparison of health utility assessments in chronic rhinosinusitis.

Background: Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is a common condition encountered in primary care medicine and is estimated to affect 12.5% of the United States population. This study aims to compare methods of assessing health utility in CRS.

Effects of carotid body tumor resection on the blood pressure of essential hypertensive patients.

Removal of carotid body (CB) improves animal models of hypertension (HTN) and heart failure, via withdrawal of chemoreflex-induced sympathetic activation. Effect of CB tumor (CBT) resection on blood pressure (BP) in subjects with HTN is unknown. A retrospective analysis of 20 subjects with HTN (BP≥140/90 mmHg or anti-hypertensives use) out of 134 with CBT resection.

Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI): Development and Validation.

Objective: To develop a psychometrically sound self-report questionnaire, the Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI), to help identify individuals with vocal fatigue (VF) and characterize their complaints.

Study Design: Descriptive research-scale development.

Methods: Four laryngologists and six speech-language pathologists specialized in voice created a beta version of the VFI (version 1), an index of 21 statements they considered to reflect VF.

Prospective study of alcohol consumption and self-reported hearing loss in women.

Chronic excess alcohol intake has been associated with irreversible hearing loss and acute alcohol intake may temporarily impair auditory function; however, some evidence suggests that long-term moderate alcohol intake may be related to lower risk of hearing loss. This study prospectively examined the association between total alcohol and individual alcoholic beverage consumption and risk of hearing loss in women. Data were prospectively collected from 65,424 participants in the Nurses' Health Study II (NHS II), aged 27-44 years at baseline (follow-up 1991-2009).

Fish and fatty acid consumption and the risk of hearing loss in women.

Background: Acquired hearing loss is common and often disabling, yet limited prospective data exist on potentially modifiable risk factors. Evidence suggests that higher intake of fish and long-chain omega-3 (n-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) may be associated with a lower risk of hearing loss, but prospective information on these relations is limited.

Objective: We prospectively examined the independent associations between consumption of total and specific types of fish, long-chain omega-3 PUFAs, and self-reported hearing loss in women.

Evidence for the expansion of pediatric cochlear implant candidacy.

Objective: To test the hypothesis that children who are non-traditional cochlear implant candidates, but are not making progress with appropriately fitted hearing aids and intervention, will demonstrate significant benefit from cochlear implantation as defined by improvement in (1) speech perception, (2) auditory skills development, and/or (3) progress on standardized measures of receptive and expressive language.

Study Design: Retrospective case series.

Setting: Two tertiary academic cochlear implant centers.

Commentary: listening can be exhausting--fatigue in children and adults with hearing loss.

Anecdotal reports of fatigue after sustained speech-processing demands are common among adults with hearing loss; however, systematic research examining hearing loss-related fatigue is limited, particularly with regard to fatigue among children with hearing loss (CHL). Many audiologists, educators, and parents have long suspected that CHL experience stress and fatigue as a result of the difficult listening demands they encounter throughout the day at school. Recent research in this area provides support for these intuitive suggestions.

Binaural interference: effects of temporal interferer fringe and interstimulus interval.

Binaural interference refers to the phenomenon in which the potency of binaural cues conveyed by a "target" stimulus occupying one spectral region is degraded by the presence of an "interferer" stimulus occupying a spectral region remote from the target. It is typified by conditions in which thresholds for detection of interaural temporal difference conveyed by a high-frequency target are elevated when the target is accompanied by a spectrally remote low-frequency interferer. This study explored effects of temporal relations between targets and interferers on binaural interference.

Estimates of cochlear compression using distortion product otoacoustic emissions and growth of forward masking.

Objective: The authors investigated the relationship between behavioral and physiologic estimates of cochlear compression.

Design: Cochlear compression was estimated in distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) fine structure minima and maxima near 4 kHz. The composite DPOAE response and separated generator and reflection components yielded three estimates in four young adults with normal hearing.

Amplitude normalization reduces cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potential (cVEMP) amplitude asymmetries in normal subjects: proof of concept.

Background: The cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potential (cVEMP) is an acoustically synchronized, signal averaged, brief inhibitory response of a contracted muscle usually resulting from an acoustic stimulus. The cVEMP is recorded from the tonically contracted sternocleidomastoid muscle (SCM). The presence and amplitude of the cVEMP is related to both the integrity of the sacculo-collic pathway and magnitude of electromyographic (EMG) activity at the time of recording.

Assessing outcomes of tinnitus intervention.

Background: It has been estimated that as many as 50 million Americans do experience or have experienced tinnitus. For approximately 12 million of these individuals, tinnitus makes it impossible for them to carry out normal everyday activities without limitation. These are the patients that present to audiology clinics for assessment and management.

The benefits of bimodal hearing: effect of frequency region and acoustic bandwidth.

We examined the effects of acoustic bandwidth on bimodal benefit for speech recognition in adults with a cochlear implant (CI) in one ear and low-frequency acoustic hearing in the contralateral ear. The primary aims were to (1) replicate Zhang et al. [Ear Hear 2010;31:63-69] with a steeper filter roll-off to examine the low-pass bandwidth required to obtain bimodal benefit for speech recognition and expand results to include different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and talker genders, (2) determine whether the bimodal benefit increased with acoustic low-pass bandwidth and (3) determine whether an equivalent bimodal benefit was obtained with acoustic signals of similar low-pass and pass band bandwidth, but different center frequencies.

Recovery of vibratory function after vocal fold microflap in a rabbit model.

Objectives/hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the return of vibratory function and restoration of vibration amplitude and symmetry after vocal fold microflap surgery.

Study Design: Prospective in vivo animal model.

Methods: Microflap surgery was performed on 30 New Zealand white breeder rabbits.