Category: Hearing / Deafness

A revised policy statement from the Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (JCIH; seven organizations, including the AAP) recommends that pediatricians take the lead in ensuring that all infants are screened for hearing loss by age 1 month, diagnosed with hearing loss by 3 months, and engaged in full intervention services by 6 months.

A revised policy statement from the Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (JCIH; seven organizations, including the AAP) recommends that pediatricians take the lead in ensuring that all infants are screened for hearing loss by age 1 month, diagnosed with hearing loss by 3 months, and engaged in full intervention services by 6 months.

A new system to identify developmental problems including disability in premature infants has shown promise. The new system, called the Preterm-Targeted Screening and Surveillance Program, has successfully identified cerebral palsy, developmental and intellectual delays, blindness and deafness in a trial group of 202 premature babies throughout Queensland.

In a breakthrough that will likely accelerate research aimed at cures for hearing loss, tinnitus, and balance problems, scientists have perfected a laboratory culturing technique that provides a reliable new source of cells critical to understanding certain inner-ear disorders.The cells, known as hair cells, are the essential sound and balance detectors in the inner ear.

Dr. Jimmy Devins, T.D., Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, addressed the Irish Deaf Society’s launch of the Irish Sign Language awareness week.

While the visual regions of the brain have been intensively mapped, many important regions for auditory processing remain terra incognita. Now, researchers have identified the region responsible for a key auditory process — perceiving “sound space,” the location of sounds. The findings settle a controversy in earlier studies that failed to establish the auditory region, called the planum temporale, as responsible for perceiving auditory space.Leon Y.

On September 19, a research report by Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Computational Engineering scientists will appear in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, showing that selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex.

Two million babies in England will have had their hearing screened thanks to the NHS Newborn Hearing Screening Programme. The programme , which has been rolling out across England since 2001, screens 1700 babies each day, and marks one of the biggest achievements in children’s audiology and services for deaf children and their families, in the last forty years.

The discovery of the first anatomically modern ear in a group of 260 million-year-old fossil reptiles significantly pushes back the date of the origin of an advanced sense of hearing, and suggests the first known adaptations to living in the dark.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers showed that two key proteins join together at the precise location where energy of motion is turned into electrical impulses. These proteins, cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15, are part of a complex of proteins called “tip links” that are on hair cells in the inner ear. The tip link is believed to have a central function in the conversion of physical cues into electrochemical signals.