Articles

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    Does your child have Auditory Processing Disorder?

    Supporting every child to fulfil their potential It’s the start of the school year for many schools. If your little one is starting school for the first time, or even if they’ve been at school for a few years, it’s important to be alert to any potential hearing issues they may have.  Children are great at compensating for any problems, and never want to feel singled out. However, left unchecked, and any hearing or learning problems can have a serious impact on your child’s language development, confidence, social skills and performance at school. Around 5% of school age children experience auditory processing difficulties, or APD, which is a hearing problem.…

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    Genetic Testing can help save newborn hearing.

    Imagine being the parent of a baby admitted to intensive care and needing antibiotics. You don’t question what antibiotics they are, or their long-term effects. However, one in 500 babies born in the UK possess a gene that can lead to permanent hearing loss if they’re given the common emergency antibiotic, Gentamicin. The first hour of a baby’s treatment in an Emergency Department is key. Up until now, any test to show a genetic vulnerability to Gentamicin took days for results to be known. By which time, antibiotics had been administered. But a new genetic test trialled by the NHS now takes less than half an hour to show if…

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    Hearing underwater

    Hearing in a watery world. If you’re lucky enough to be heading off on a summer holiday this year, have a listen to what you can and can’t hear as you dive into the hotel pool and submerge yourself in a watery world. Consciously listen to the difference in sounds that you hear underwater compared to those you experience on dry land. Underwater, sounds are muffled, and it’s hard to work out where they’re coming from – left, right, back or front. That’s because, underwater, we pick up very little sound via our normal hearing pathway. Instead, sound tends to travel directly through the head. It also travels much faster…

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    Diabetes and hearing loss

    Discover the diabetes-hearing loss link Today marks the start of Diabetes Awareness Week, making this the perfect time to highlight the link between hearing loss and diabetes.  Did you know that hearing loss is twice as common in adults with diabetes compared to those who don’t have the disease? While the cause of hearing loss here isn’t fully known, it’s widely thought that nerve damage is to blame. The prolonged high blood glucose levels associated with diabetes may affect the supply of blood or oxygen to the nerves and blood vessels of the inner ear, in much the same way as diabetes damages blood vessels and nerves in other parts…

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    New book to guide your through hearing loss

    If you’re living with hearing loss – perhaps you’ve only recently learnt that you have a hearing loss – you may find it hard to come to terms with the news. Luckily, there’s a newly published book that may help you to change the way you feel about hearing loss. ‘Hear & Beyond: Live skillfully with hearing loss’ is by author, blogger and film maker, Shari Eberts, who has an adult-onset, genetic hearing loss. She has co-written the book with Gael Hannan, a speaker, writer and trainer on hearing loss issues who has severe-to-profound hearing loss, which was diagnosed at age three. Both women bring their experiences to this easy-to-read…

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    Electrodes stimulate the hearing brain to improve hearing speech in noise

    Sometimes the biggest scientific breakthroughs happen by accident. Recently surgeons found that stimulating a specific part of the brain’s auditory cortex near the planum temporale  immediately improved speech perception over background noise. They happened to be implanting electrodes into a patient’s brain to pinpoint the area that triggered the person’s epilepsy seizures – a tactic used in severe cases of the condition. Surgeons stimulated the patient’s planum temporale while playing sound clips of someone talking in extensive background noise. The patient deciphered the spoken sentence and rated the clarity as a 4 or 5 out of 5. Without stimulation, the patient could hear only a few of the words and rated…

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    Do you have auditory processing disorder?

    Do you have APD? Even when a person has normal hearing, they may still face challenges with listening and processing information. This is called auditory processing disorder, or APD. APD is a lifelong disability and an acknowledged hearing impairment by the World Health Organisation. It’s unrelated to intelligence but it can affect your ability to take on board information, follow directions, read and engage in conversation. A child with APD will find it harder to learn to read and spell. Every person who is living with APD is affected differently, depending on their ability to cope and adapt. APD also varies in severity, day-to-day and during the day and can…

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    Noise in the workplace. What you need to know.

    Studies show dentists have twice the rate of hearing loss and tinnitus compared to the general population due to the loud drills and equipment that they use daily. The noise from these can top 90 decibels (dB). According to the NHS, any sound over 85dB can be harmful to hearing. Since 2008, the Control of Noise at Work Regulations have applied to all workplaces. These state that a daily noise exposure averaged over eight hours of 80dB requires employers to provide information, training and make hearing protection available. When that level reaches 85dB, employers are required to take measures to reduce noise exposure. That means wearing hearing protection and providing hearing…

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    Are the beers affecting your ears?

    Today marks the beginning of Alcohol Awareness Week, and, while we don’t want to get preachy, it’s important to understand how regularly overindulging on the booze can lead to damaged hearing. Excessive drinking causes a toxic environment in the inner ear, damaging those tiny hair cells that translate sound into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain, which can lead to hearing loss. Excessive booze damages the auditory cortex in the brain, making you unable to correctly process sounds. It can also change the volume and composition of fluid in the inner ear, causing dizziness and imbalance as well as hearing loss. Tinnitus can be an unwelcome side effect too.…

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    Are your child’s headphones damaging their hearing?

    We’re obviously all very aware of protecting our children from viewing inappropriate content online, but fewer of us will have thought about the damage being caused to our children’s hearing by the volume of the content they’re viewing. Children today have a world of audio and video content served up to them via computers, tablets, consoles and phones, and they’ll often use devices like headphones, earphones and earbuds – collectively called ‘hearables’ – to listen to this content. But until now it hasn’t been possible for parents to know how loud, or for how long, their children have been listening. This obviously creates the potential for permanent hearing damage. The World Health…

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