View clinical trials related to Deafness.
Filter by:The prevalence of childhood hearing loss in rural Alaska is disproportionately high and predominately infection-related. With preventive screenings and access to health care, much of childhood hearing loss is preventable. Although state-mandated school screening helps identify children with hearing loss, loss to follow-up is pervasive and exacerbated by a scarcity of specialists in rural regions. A mixed methods cluster randomized trial conducted in northwest Alaska demonstrated that telemedicine can significantly reduce loss to follow-up. This stepped wedge trial, in partnership with Southcentral Foundation, will build on this existing work to develop a model that can be scaled in diverse environments. We will adapt and implement a new telemedicine intervention called Specialty Telemedicine Access for Referrals (STAR). This trial will be conducted in 3 regions in rural Alaska that represent multiple healthcare systems. Based on stakeholder feedback and evidence generated from the previous trial, an enhanced mobile health (mHealth) hearing screening will be implemented in all participating schools prior to the STAR intervention, and the telemedicine referral to specialty care (STAR intervention) will be moved from the clinic directly into the school. This stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial is part of a larger hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation trial. The stepped wedge trial will evaluate the effectiveness of the STAR intervention in reducing loss to follow-up from referred school hearing screening in 3 regions of Alaska: Kodiak, Petersburg and Lower Yukon (n=23 schools, ~2,015 K-12 students/year). The STAR Intervention will be compared to the standard referral of a letter home to families. Cluster randomization at the level of school will be performed, with schools (clusters) randomized to one of two sequences. The effectiveness outcome (i.e., proportion of children who receive follow-up) will be evaluated over three academic years (2023-2026), with STAR rolled out in a stepwise manner for each of the two sequences (academic year 2024-2025 for sequence 1 and academic year 2025-2026 for sequence 2). The control periods for each sequence will be academic year 2023-2024 for sequence 1 and academic years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 for sequence 2. Enhanced screening will be rolled out to both sequences at the same time (i.e., non-randomized) beginning academic year 2023-2024. An implementation evaluation will be conducted to refine and adapt the enhanced hearing screening and STAR intervention throughout the trial. Implementation data will be collected starting academic year 2022-2023 and then annually for each of the subsequent years.
This is a retrospective and prospective longitudinal study in participants with Otoferlin Gene-Mediated Hearing Loss.
The current standard of care approach for programming cochlear implants uses a generalized pitch-map for all patients. This approach fails to account for individualized inner ear anatomy. As a result, many cochlear implant recipients experience place-pitch mismatch. We have recently developed an automated mathematical tool to produce patient-specific, customized cochlear implant pitch-maps (Helpard et al., 2021). In this study, cochlear implant recipients will be randomized to receive either the clinical default pitch-map (the control group) or a place-based pitch-map (the intervention group). Assessments will be conducted at multiple time-intervals to account for patient acclimation and plasticity to both the generalized and individualized pitch-maps. Audiological assessments will be tuned to identify patients' ability to discern pitch scaling and variation in sounds, as well as to understand complexities in speech such as mood and tone. Audiological testing will be conducted in collaboration with the National Centre for Audiology (London, ON) to ensure that the most accurate and relevant metrics are applied.
The primary objective of this study is to determine the (long term) effect of intervention with a CI in adult participants with progressive postlingual moderate/severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss on societal related outcomes (participation; communication profile; autonomy; cognition; listening effort; work; productivity loss; income; medical consumption; third party quality of life; quality of life, and capability). The secondary objective is to determine the effect of CI waiting time between referral and CI surgery on the same societal related outcomes, in the adults with postlingual moderate/severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss.
This trial will evaluate a multilevel intervention (STAR model) that combines mobile health (mHealth) hearing screening tools with telemedicine technology for specialty care access in rural Kentucky schools. An initial version of the model was used in rural Alaska where telemedicine-based specialty referral improved both proportion of children receiving follow-up and time to follow-up. The refined STAR model will utilize an enhanced mHealth screening protocol that includes tympanometry for the detection of middle ear disease. The STAR model will also include a specialty telemedicine referral process in schools for children who refer school screening.
This study will improve the understanding of the cerebral mechanisms that underlie the control of auditory selective attention and evaluate the potential of neuromodulation to enhance neural attention control as a possible way to overcome hearing impairment. First, electroencephalography (EEG) will be applied to identify neural marker of auditory attention in individuals with hearing loss (HL), tinnitus (TI) and normal hearing (NH). Afterwards, the importance of the identified markers for attention control will be tested using non-invasive transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) and neurofeedback (NF).
This study is designed to advance the promising yet underutilized research on retrieval practice by evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of two key retrieval practice features (feedback and spacing). The study uses four single case adapted alternating treatments studies, each with four 5- to 8-year-old children who are deaf and hard of hearing to evaluate the effects of feedback and spacing on the efficiency of word learning and retention.
Patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) show significant deficits and strong unexplained intersubject variability in their perception and production of spoken emotions in speech. This project will investigate the hypothesis that "cue-weighting", or how patients utilize the different acoustic cues to emotion, accounts for significant variance in emotional communication with CIs. The results will focus on children with CIs, but parallel measures in postlingually deaf adults with CIs will be made, ensuring that results of these studies benefit social communication by CI patients across the lifespan by informing the development of technological innovations and improved clinical protocols.
This study is to build a cohort of sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) patients. When the patient visited the Department of otolaryngology clinic for hearing loss, we can diagnose the SSNHL following the result of pure tone audiometry and the history of the patient. The cohort is a system that tracks the hearing recovery status, timing, and degree of recovery of patients who received cocktail therapy with or without high-dose steroids, vasodilators, antiviral agents, and intratympanic steroid injections, satellite ganglion block, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Spatial hearing capacities of soldiers with acoustic trauma are evaluated in ENT consultations with routine tests (i.e. tonal audiometry, voice audiometry). While the results conclude that soldiers with acoustic trauma have sufficient abilities to carry out professional missions, soldiers report recurring complaints of sound localization (spatial hearing), i.e. difficulties in identifying the position of sound sources in their environment. However, there is currently no objective test to identify and objectify these complaints of spatial hearing. The investigators have developed a new approach (SPHERE) based on virtual reality and 3D motion tracking, allowing us to evaluate and record the spatial hearing performance of subject with hearing deficit. This system allowed us to highlight localization deficits in three-dimensional space. This project explores and quantifies the spatial hearing impairments of soldiers with acoustic trauma. The quantification of the spatial hearing capacities will allow to define a specific rehabilitation strategy of spatial hearing deficits.