Feature Channels: Hearing

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Researchers at the John T. Macdonald Department of Human Genetics and John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine have found that inherited mutations in the MINAR2 gene caused deafness in four families. The gene variation mostly affects the inner ear hair cells, which are critical to hearing. The authors believe the progressive nature of this hearing loss, in some affected individuals and in mice, could offer opportunities for treatment.

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The Hearing Norton Sound study, which focused on school-based hearing screening programs in rural Alaska, showed that referring children to specialists via telemedicine provides significantly quicker access to follow-up care than referring them to primary care providers.

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A lecturer from the Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University has developed a toy that instills a sense of compassion in children while teaching them to live happily with people with disabilities and the elderly in society.

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Here are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Aging channel on Newswise, a free source for journalists.

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Like a lot of young children, from the time she was a year old, Cassidy Clapp was plagued by one ear infection after another.

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Smart hearing aids that adapt to the individual needs of the user: for the last four years, the researchers of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) Hearing Acoustics have been working towards this goal.

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For someone using an assistive listening device in a crowded place, it might make little difference whether the device is on or off. Nearby conversation directed at the user might be drowned out by distant conversation between other people, ambient noise from the environment, or music or speech piped through a loudspeaker system. Corey and his colleagues worked to eliminate at least one source of noise, the one emanating from loudspeakers or other broadcast systems.

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In her presentation, "Aging effects on listening effort in cochlear-implant users," Kristina DeRoy Milvae will discuss the results of two experiments that examined impacts on listening effort. The session will take place May 24 at 12:50 p.m. Eastern U.S. at the 182nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel.

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Keck Medicine of USC study demonstrates the need for early cochlear implant use for deaf children, regardless of developmental impairments

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“I am honored to be the recipient of this award at this point in my career. I am blessed that my vocation is my avocation: I love my work as a speech pathologist!” said Soriano, who joined JFK Johnson in 1984.

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Here are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Clinical Trials channel on Newswise.

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Babies and toddlers who need a tracheostomy – a tube surgically inserted into their windpipe to help relieve breathing problems – are at a high risk of accumulating fluid behind their eardrum when on a ventilator. That’s the conclusion of a new study, published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, by UT Southwestern head and neck surgeons. This buildup of fluid, called a middle ear effusion, can put them at risk for ear infections, hearing loss, and delays in speech and language development.

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A newly published study of orb-weaving spiders has yielded some extraordinary results: The spiders are using their webs as extended auditory arrays to capture sounds, possibly giving spiders advanced warning of incoming prey or predators.

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Consumers who want a hearing aid must obtain a prescription and make the purchase through an audiologist. And that’s expensive, often running in the thousands of dollars. An “over the counter” hearing device being developed at UW-Milwaukee costs much less, but works just as well as a hearing aid for people with mild to moderate hearing loss.

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Mass Eye and Ear research shows the viral vector Anc80L65 efficiently transferred genetic cargo into the inner ear of nonhuman primates via a specialized surgical procedure, paving the way for a method that can be brought to clinical trials for hearing loss and vestibular disorder treatments.

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A Johns Hopkins Medicine study of about 50 people with Alzheimer’s disease has added to evidence that damage to the inner ear system that controls balance is a major factor in patients’ well-documented higher risk of falling.

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Don't miss these articles in our Staff Picks channel

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New research shows turtles can experience temporary hearing loss from an excess of underwater noise. This phenomenon, previously noted in other marine animals such as dolphins and fish, was not widely understood for reptiles and underscores another potential risk for aquatic turtles. This high volume of sound, referred to as underwater noise pollution, can be caused by passing ships and offshore construction.

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Many people impacted by COVID-19 experienced changes in their sense of smell, taste, hearing, balance and in some cases, tinnitus, “ringing” in the ears. Among the various causes of tinnitus is stress. What’s unclear, however, is whether the psychological impacts of the pandemic such as stress actually worsened tinnitus. Results of a new study do not support the idea that the pandemic led to a worsening of tinnitus.

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To understand how hearing loss impacts people, researchers study people's ability to recognize speech, and hearing aid algorithms are often used to improve human speech recognition. In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers explore a human speech recognition model based on machine learning and deep neural networks. They calculated how many words per sentence a listener understands using automatic speech recognition. The study consisted of eight normal-hearing and 20 hearing-impaired listeners who were exposed to a variety of complex noises that mask the speech.

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Americans spend an average of four hours per day listening to audio either on headphones or on speakers, but there are major differences in the psychological effects between the two mediums. Headphones have a much more powerful impact on listeners’ perceptions, judgments and behaviors.

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The Latest Research News in Cardiovascular Health

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After receiving a $2 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Rehabilitation Services Administration, and UNC’s contribution of more than $185,000, a program called Project CLIMB was created. Project CLIMB stands for Cultivating Legal Interpreters from Minority Backgrounds.

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University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and UH Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital are participating in a Cochlear Americas’-sponsored clinical trial for an implantable hearing device in children 5 to 11 years of age who have been born with hearing loss that may be caused by craniofacial abnormalities. UH was the first site in the nation to kick off the trial.

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Any parent who has tried to comfort a child with an ear infection will appreciate Fan-Gang Zeng’s prediction. “With a smartphone, you’ll be able to take a picture of the child’s ear and send it to the doctor or a website,” says the UCI professor of otolaryngology, biomedical engineering, cognitive sciences, and anatomy & neurobiology, who also directs the campus’s Center for Hearing Research.

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The latest research news from the Health Disparities Channel.

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Restoring hearing through cochlear implantation for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can help them understand spoken language and enhance social interactions, according to a study from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The study reported long-term outcomes of the largest number of children with ASD who received a cochlear implant, with mean follow-up of 10.5 years.

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins APL team aim to create an ideal baby monitor that alerts parents when their baby needs attention but does not transmit or amplify sound from other sources. The project uses open-source audio processing hardware, originally intended for hearing aids, to filter out unwanted noises that may lead parents to turn down their baby monitor volume and potentially miss infant cries. They plan to keep babies' whole frequency range in mind as they explore signal processing options.

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During pandemic-induced isolation, researchers from the University of Minnesota surveyed older adults with vision loss, with hearing loss, or without either condition, asking the participants about their worries, well-being, and social isolation at six-week intervals. All three groups scored lower on a patient health questionnaire after the pandemic began; however, people with vision or hearing loss faced unique problems in lockdown. Disruptions to mobility systems affected people with low vision, and masks made conversations especially difficult for adults with hearing loss.

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Difficulty in understanding speech, especially in background noise, is a common concern for older adults. Using a word identification task in quiet and noisy conditions, researchers examined the impact of mild dementia on speech perception. They tested individuals with and without mild dementia and found that word identification scores of those without dementia were significantly better in all conditions, meaning people with mild dementia symptoms recalled fewer words in both quiet and noisy situations.

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Bats use their acoustical abilities to create discrete echo snapshots and build representations of their environments, producing sounds for echolocation through contracting the larynx or clicking their tongues before analyzing the returning echoes. This acoustic information facilitates navigation and foraging, often in total darkness. Echo snapshots provide interrupted sensory information about target insect trajectory to build prediction models of prey location, and by amalgamating representations of prey echoes, bats can determine prey distance, size, shape, and density.

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Converting newly emptied office spaces into podcast studios poses noise challenges not previously realized before hybrid offices began. Offices are less busy and less noisy, meaning recording spaces can be used more often, and newly empty private offices can become podcast studios. But existing spaces present multiple acoustic challenges -- single-glazed windows, nearby noise sources, and limited available surface area, to name a few. Experts recommend considering location, nearby noise sources, and ways to absorb sound to make a studio effective.

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Pernell T. Reid, MD, MHA, MS, an experienced health care administrator with nearly two decades of practice management and financial leadership experience in academic medicine, is joining Mass Eye and Ear (a member hospital of Mass General Brigham) as Senior Vice President of the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS).

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Black Americans 65 years and older have much better hearing than their White counterparts, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

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Press conferences at the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held Wednesday, Dec. 1, in room 505 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. The media availabilities will focus on wide range of newsworthy sessions at the upcoming meeting from killer whales spending more time in the Arctic Ocean to knocking over Lego minifigures with time reversal focused vibration. For more information, contact AIP Media.

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In recent studies, researchers find 1) Few people get a timely diagnosis of dementia, especially if they are of color with no college degree. 2) No dementia risk in members of military over 65. 3) Link to hearing and dementia.

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Study reveals common loud noises cause fluid buildup in the inner ear and suggests simple possible cure for noise-induced hearing loss

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In a paper published online in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, experts from the UK and US are calling for artificial intelligence to be applied to advancing research and developing new therapies to meet the growing global demand for hearing care.

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Researchers have identified the mechanism that can lead to deafness in the rare syndrome, Norrie disease, which may lead to promising treatment targets for the incurable disease and other forms of profound hearing loss.

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The AAO-HNSF 2021 Annual Meeting & OTO Experience is presenting cutting-edge and late-breaking science October 3-6, in Los Angeles, California. Access the Best of Oral and Late-Breaking Scientific presentation abstracts at https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/otoj/165/1_suppl.

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An interdisciplinary team at Saint Louis University is collaborating to educate African American adults 60 and over about the link between brain health and hearing loss while providing vital services for the community.

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A team led by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine has published an online interactive atlas representing the changes in the levels of RNA made in the different cell types of ears of mice, after damage due to loud noise.

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“We are excited to open up this new service to our growing community,” said William DiStanislao, interim president, chief hospital executive, Raritan Bay Medical Center Old Bridge. “Our certified audiologist will work closely with our medical director to interpret findings and recommend appropriate treatment.”

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