Volume 51 Issue 2

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One Online Store and two Employment Opportunities

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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- Article 1: Study to Test New Tinnitus 'Treatment'
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A new clinical trial is to test whether a pocket-sized device that uses sound simulation to reboot faulty 'wiring' in the brain could cure people with the debilitating hearing disorder tinnitus.

The CR(r) neuromodulation device delivers specific sequences of sounds to disrupt the pattern of neurons firing in the brain. It is believed that conditions such as hearing loss can cause neurons in the brain to fire simultaneously instead of in a random pattern which can cause an overload and lead to a ringing or buzzing in the ear, the classic symptom of tinnitus.

The study is being led by the National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing (NBRUH) which is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), a partnership bringing together expertise from researchers at The University of Nottingham and the Medical Research Council Institute of Hearing with leading clinicians from Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Dr Derek Hoare, a research fellow at the NBRUH, said: "In the UK, around five million people suffer from tinnitus, a debilitating condition which can be exceptionally difficult to treat due to the huge variation in symptoms and severity between individual patients.

"We know there are very many people out there suffering with tinnitus who have tried a number of different treatments including hearing aids, sound therapies, counselling and other alternative medicines such as acupuncture but to no avail.

"We want to scientifically establish whether this new method of sound simulation could offer patients a new hope for treating tinnitus, which can have such a distressing impact on people's day to day lives."

Tinnitus is a secondary symptom usually resulting from damage to the ears, including hearing loss following exposure to loud noises, congenital hearing loss, ear infections and ear hair cell death caused by exposure to a number of different drugs.

The revolutionary CR(r) neuromodulation device is already being marketed by the private healthcare sector both in the UK and in Germany, where it was originally manufactured and where an exploratory study has already produced promising results.

Funded with just over £345,000 from the specialist private audiologists The Tinnitus Clinic in London, the study will also involve collaboration with experts at the Ear Institute at University College London (UCL).

The scientists will be looking to recruit patients who have suffered from bothersome tinnitus for at least three months but are not currently receiving any treatment for the condition. Those with associated hearing loss will need to forego the use of their normal hearing aid for the four to six hours per day when the device needs to be worn.

The study will involve two groups of participants, one of which will be fitted with the CR(r) neuromodulation device and the other of which will be fitted with a placebo device. Over a period of three months, the researchers will then monitor the effect of wearing the device on the patient's condition through a series of hearing tests, questionnaires and EEG recordings of the electrical activity of their brain.

After three months, all patients -- even those who previously received a placebo -- will be fitted with a working device which they will be free to keep.

The researchers hope to be able to prove that by disrupting the abnormal firing of neurons in the brain the device can encourage them to return to a normal healthy pattern, eradicating the symptoms of tinnitus. In some cases, patients may find the device has permanently improved their symptoms, with potentially no further treatment needed in the future.

The National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing was established in 2008 as part of the National Institute for Health Research and is the only biomedical research unit funded to conduct pure translational research in deafness and hearing problems, taking new medical discoveries into a clinical setting for the benefit of patients.

Source: University of Nottingham

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- Article 2: Rock music and no protection leads to damaged hearing
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Editor: It's probably not a surprise to regular readers that loud rock music can cause hearing loss. But you may be surprised to learn how loud some of these bands are. It's no wonder that so many musicians are affected by hearing loss.

Thanks to hear-it.org for permission to share this article. Please visit them at hear-it.org for the latest in hearing news.

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A high volume is part of the game when you are a rock musician. It is part of the concert experience to feel the bass in the floor and in your body. But these volumes can also be hard on your hearing and have been a part of the music as long as rock has existed.

For some rock bands, high-level volume is a part of their brand, maybe even what they are most known for. A high volume as always gone hand in hand with rock music since bands like Deep Purple, The Who, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath laid the foundations for the future of rock.

Sadly, rock concerts have not only given the public and the musicians joy. Reduced hearing and tinnitus are dangerously close when the volume reaches the 130 decibel (dB) mark. Even sounds over 85db can be hazardous for our hearing.

Manowar

Heavy metal band Manowar is in the Guinness World Records as the loudest band in the world. They won this title for the first time in 1984 and then again 10 years later, when they reached a volume of 129,5dB. Guinness World Records do not, however, include this category anymore for fear that musicians will damage their hearing as they attempt to break the record. Rumour has it that Manowar have since reached a volume of 139dB at the Magic Circle Festival in Bad Arolsen in Germany.

The Who

Eight years before Manowar's first record, British band The Who were noted for reaching a volume of 126dB at a concert in the sports stadium The Valley in London. This happened while the band was on tour with their The Who By Numbers album.

Led Zeppelin

At a concert by the British band Led Zeppelin in 1969, The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association apparently recorded a volume of 130dB during the song "Heartbreaker". A year later, Rolling Stone Magazine wrote that Led Zeppelin number "Whole Lotta Love" was the loudest on stage in 1970.

Deep Purple

Even though it sounds like a tall tale, Deep Purple were noted as the world's loudest band by Guinness World Records in 1972. At a concert in London's Rainbow Theatre, which has a capacity of 3000, a volume of 117dB was recorded during the concert. The sound pressure from this volume, combined with the closed room, meant that three people fainted.

Mötorhead

When you release an album entitled "Everything Louder Than Everything Else", you have to play loud otherwise you are not giving the audience what they had been promised. And there is no doubt that Mötorhead keep their word.

Crosby, Stills and Nash

One musician who has suffered from hearing loss because of his music is Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash. For many years, he did not use ear plugs of any kind when he was performing or recording in the studio. Today, on the advice of his colleague Neil Young, he uses hearing aids.

Music and noise can cause hearing loss: http://www.hear-it.org/Noise-and-hearing-loss

Protect your hearing with ear plugs: http://www.hear-it.org/Earplugs-make-a-difference

Ringing in your ears? It might just be tinnitus: http://www.hear-it.org/tinnitus--an-individual-condition

Sources: www.meyersound.com, www.gibson.com

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- Article 3: Research could help deaf people hear amidst the noise
By Amy Patterson Neubert
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A new understanding about how the inner ear processes the temporal structure of sound could some day improve how prosthetic hearing devices are designed to help people with profound hearing loss hear better in noisy places, according to new Purdue University research.

"Sound can be divided into fast and slow components, and today's cochlear implants provide only the slow varying components that help people with profound hearing loss hear conversations in quiet rooms, but don't allow them to hear as well in busy restaurants," said Michael G. Heinz, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences who specializes in auditory neuroscience. "It has been thought that the fast varying sound components - which can't be provided with current cochlear implant technology - help to hear in noisy environments. Evidence for this idea has come from listening experiments that were interpreted based on the assumption that the fast and slow sound components could be separated within the ear.

"We decided to approach this problem by acknowledging that this separation is theoretically impossible to achieve but not impossible to deal with. We found that slowly varying neural components actually play the primary role in helping the brain understand speech in noisy environments. The critical fast varying acoustic components are actually transformed by the normal-hearing cochlea into slower neural components to ultimately help people hear better. Additional studies will be needed to explore how current cochlear implant technology can be adjusted to account for these cochlear transformations."

Heinz and Jayaganesh Swaminathan, a Purdue graduate and post-doctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed how sounds picked up by normal hearing ears are understood by the brain. Previous studies had evaluated the perception of sound's acoustic waveform. However, focusing on the neural processing in this study clarified how fast and slow varying components each contribute to speech perception. The findings were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience.

"Some have thought that one component can exist without the other, but now we know this is impossible to achieve in the ear, and this new knowledge can help scientists who are working to improve cochlear implant design," Swaminathan says.

Cochlear implants are a surgically implanted neural prosthesis that is used by more than 200,000 patients worldwide. The device helps deaf people whose cochlea is missing its hair cells translate sound into neural responses as the implant's electrodes stimulate the auditory nerve fibers.

"But, perhaps cochlear implants are not delivering all of the useful information with their current stimulation strategies," Swaminathan says. "At this time, their design focuses on the slowly varying components in the acoustic waveform rather than what the slowly varying components look like in the neural responses of normal-hearing ears."

The researchers used a psychophysiological approach that quantitatively linked neural coding - based on a computational auditory nerve model - and perception of speech in noise that was measured using normal hearing people. The same set of five specialized acoustic stimuli produced by vocoders was used, and listeners were asked to identify one of 16 consonants in varying degrees of background noise.

"The key distinction in our results is that it was the neural slow-fluctuation cues that were shown to be important rather than the acoustic slow-component cues that cochlear implants provide," said Heinz, who also has a joint appointment in biomedical engineering. "This may sound like the same thing, but the slow neural components include the effects of fast to slow conversions that occur within the normal-hearing cochlea but do not occur in the damaged ears of cochlear implant patients. These results are promising because they provide insight into a possible way to provide the useful information from fast acoustic cues using the slow fluctuations that existing cochlear implant technology can provide."

Heinz and Swaminathan will continue studying how neural signal processing can improve our understanding of speech perception in noise, as well as how these findings can be used to improve cochlear implants.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the Purdue Research Foundation, and Weinberg funds from the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.

Source: Purdue University

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- Article 4: Short Takes
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Editor: Here are our picks of some additional stories that you may find interesting. For more, please point your browser to: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm

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United Health/hi HealthInnovations Pulls Online Test

The online hearing test developed by hi HealthInnovations and designed to prescribe amplification for the company's hearing aids has been taken down for "enhancements", according to the company as originally reported online by the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA). There is no mention about when the test will go back online, and hi HealthInnovations did not immediately respond to HR. Currently, the test is preceded by a Web page that provides instructions on how to get a hearing test that states: "Ask your physician for a hearing test. We have provided hearing test kits to many physicians, but if your physician does not have a kit, please ask them to call [phone number]." When one clicks on the "Start Hearing Test or Enter Audiogram Results", which at one time brought visitors to the "Home version"- the most controversial of the company's hearing tests-it now only allows visitors to enter values from an audiogram.

http://www.hearingreview.com/news/2012-04-09_02.asp

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Cochlear Implants Redefine What It Means To Be Deaf

There was a time when a child born deaf had few choices. For more than a century, the only option for parents was to send their son or daughter away to a boarding school for the deaf. There, the children and the schools thrived in the shadows, embracing a distinct culture of silent communication. Recent advances in medicine and technology are now reshaping what it means to be deaf in America. Children who could never hear a sound are now adults who can hear everything. That's having a dramatic impact on the nation's historic deaf schools as well as the lives of people. One of those people is 31-year-old Shehzaad Zaman, who was born deaf. Everyone else in his family could hear, and his parents worried - they wanted him to fit into a hearing world. "My parents wanted me to learn how to speak and how to listen, despite not being able to hear," Zaman tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan. He went to a special school at first, but in third grade his parents changed their minds. They sent him to therapy to teach him to read lips and moved him to his neighborhood school in Long Island, N.Y. He learned to play sports and make friends, but it was never easy.

http://tinyurl.com/dx2nfhk

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AMC to make moviegoing more accessible for vision-, hearing-impaired

AMC Theatres will install captioning and audio-description technology in all of its theaters in Illinois to aid movie-watchers with hearing and vision disabilities. The move will affect hundreds of movie screens statewide. The personal devices will be equipped with captioning and audio-description services for vision-impaired and hearing-impaired viewers, said Maura Possley, a spokeswoman for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The attorney general's office approached AMC two years ago after the advocacy group Equip for Equality complained that only a small fraction of movie theaters offered the technology and did so for only a limited number of movies, usually at off-hours showings. The attorney general's office didn't sue AMC but negotiated with the Kansas City, Mo.-based theater chain to make its movie showings more accessible.

http://tinyurl.com/6udoe2y

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- Classifieds
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One Online Store and two Employment Opportunities appear in this issue. (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

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Employment Opportunity 1
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Employment Opportunity 2
Assistive Communication Technology Program Manager
Washington State

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Employment Opportunity 1
Exciting Career Opportunities at GLAD
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Exciting Career Opportunities at GLAD

GLAD is an Affirmative Action Employer with equal opportunity for men, women and people with disabilities. For more information on the following positions, please go to: www.gladinc.org. The status of all positions is: Regular, Full-time, Non-Exempt, Full Fringe Benefits unless otherwise noted. All positions are open until filled.

* Staff Interpreter - Bakersfield, CA
* Staff Interpreter - Los Angeles, CA
* Staff Interpreter - Riverside, CA
* Job Developer/Interpreter - Anaheim, CA

If interested for any of these positions then please submit resume and application to:

Jeff Fetterman
Human Resources Manager
Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, Inc.
2222 Laverna Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90041
V/TDD: (323) 550-4207
Fax #: (323)550-4204
E-mail: jfetterman@gladinc.org

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Employment Opportunity 2
Assistive Communication Technology Program Manager
Washington State
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WA State Job Bulletin - Assistive Communication Technology Program Manager
ODHH invites applications for the position of Social and Health Services Program Consultant 1
Applicants can apply online here: http://careers.wa.gov/index.html and type 01539 in the keyword search.
The position will remain open until filled.

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