May 17th, 2012 - Categories: News, Press Releases - Tags: better hearing month, community awareness, patient care, personalized solutions, technology, tinnitus - No Comments
The Serenade Tinnitus Treatment System is now available at Advanced Hearing Care!
New customized sound therapy approach with novel treatment sounds
SAN JOSE, California, March 26, 2012. SoundCure Inc., a new tinnitus solution provider, today announced the launch of the Serenade Tinnitus Treatment System at the upcoming American Academy of Audiology Meeting in Boston, March 28 – April 1, 2012. This marks the formal commercial release of a novel advancement in sound therapy based on the development of S-Tones®, customized treatment sounds developed independently by leading hearing researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Tinnitus, or “ringing in the ears”, affects approximately 10% of U.S. adults and an estimated 260 million people globally. It can be extremely debilitating, leading to depression, irritability, and difficulty sleeping or concentrating. It is most often related to hearing loss, especially that caused by noise damage.
Serenade is a handheld device that is programmed in the audiologist’s office for each individual patient according to his specific condition. Through the device’s earphones, the patient listens to therapeutic sounds which are designed to address the underlying neurological cause of tinnitus. Four different treatment sounds are available, anchored by advanced, proprietary S-Tones. Long-term relief can be achieved when used in an on-going sound therapy program.
The American Tinnitus Association provided a grant to UCI to develop the technology. Sound therapy as a tinnitus treatment is well-established and effective. S-Tones are low frequency, amplitude modulated tones that are frequency pitch-matched to a patient’s unique tinnitus, representing a significant clinical breakthrough compared to previous approaches. According to Dr. Fan-Gang Zeng, one of the technology inventors, these modulated tones “keep the brain’s interest” thus “inhibiting and reducing the perceived tinnitus sound and bringing relief”. In addition, S-Tones are intended to be “listened to at a volume that is lower than the patient’s tinnitus, reducing the sound burden”, according to Dr. Zeng.
SoundCure CEO Bill Perry states, “This approach was developed by a team with a deep scientific understanding of the neurophysiology of tinnitus and how the brain processes sound. It is an important solution to provide relief to patients and represents a real advance in tinnitus care.”
About SoundCure, Inc.
Established in 2009 to commercialize the technology developed for years at the University of California, Irvine, SoundCure, Inc. is a privately held medical device company whose mission is to revolutionize the treatment of tinnitus and provide relief to the millions of people suffering its effects. SoundCure is an Allied Minds company.
Serenade Tinnitus Treatment System at Advanced Hearing Care!
Advanced Hearing Care is proud to be the first provider in Oklahoma to offer the Serenade Tinnitus Treatment System! This groundbreaking technology has recently received FDA approval for the treatment of ringing in the ears. Studies are beginning to show that Serenade can offer immediate relief from the annoyance of tinnitus symptoms. For more information on the Serenade system, contact our office to schedule a consultation appointment!
May 15th, 2012 - Categories: Press Releases, Technology - Tags: better hearing month, community awareness, patient care, personalized solutions, tinnitus - No Comments
Tinnitus is the perception of a sound that has no external source.
Washington, DC, May 3, 2012—The Better Hearing Institute is joining the American Tinnitus Association (ATA) in recognizing National Tinnitus Awareness Week (TAW), May 13 to 19, 2012, and is raising awareness of hearing aids as a potential therapy to help quiet chronic “ringing in the ears.” According to a BHI study published in Hearing Review, 43.5 percent of people with tinnitus were helped at least mildly with hearing aids. And 3 out of 10 were helped moderately-to-substantially. For those whose audiologists used best practices in fitting hearing aids, the figure jumped to 50 percent. There currently is no known cure for tinnitus.
Often referred to as “ringing in the ears,” tinnitus is the perception of a sound that has no external source. Tinnitus sufferers commonly describe the noise as a ringing, humming, buzzing, and/or cricket-like. Tinnitus can be constant or intermittent. And it can be heard in one ear, both ears, or in the head. For many who suffer from it, tinnitus can be a source of endless torment and a continual drain on quality-of-life.
Nearly thirty million Americans—almost twice as many as previously believed—suffer from persistent, chronic tinnitus, according to the BHI study. That’s about ten percent of the U.S. population. And for people ages 65 to 84, that number jumps to almost 27 percent. Tinnitus is now the number one service-connected disability of returning military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The good news is there are effective therapies available to help people cope,” said Sergei Kochkin, PhD, BHI’s Executive Director. “In particular, we found that a variety of sound therapies and/or hearing aids in conjunction with counseling can help. But we need to raise awareness that effective therapies are available, including the use of hearing aids.”
Exposure to extreme noise is the leading cause of tinnitus, and people with tinnitus almost always have accompanying hearing loss. In fact, the study found that respondents with more severe hearing loss were more likely to have tinnitus. Yet, more than a third (39%) of people with hearing loss do not seek help specifically because they have tinnitus.
“Persistent, chronic tinnitus is a highly intrusive, increasingly common condition that can interfere with a person’s cognition, ability to interact with family and friends, and basic life functions,” said Jennifer Born, Director of Public Affairs at the American Tinnitus Association (ATA). “Much progress is still needed in understanding tinnitus and finding a cure—which is why Tinnitus Awareness Week is such an important effort.”
As baby boomers age, people listen to portable music players at high volumes, and more soldiers return from combat, the incidence of both hearing loss and tinnitus is expected to grow.
People suffering with tinnitus can find the latest information on their condition and methods for coping with it in an authoritative eGuide, “Your Guide to Tinnitus.” This 14-page guide covers definitions, causes, the impact of tinnitus, treatments, practical tips for managing tinnitus, and good self-help references.
“We are very pleased to join ATA this year in promoting Tinnitus Awareness Week and hope that our efforts bring us closer to finding a cure,” Kochkin said.
More About Tinnitus
Four in ten people experience their tinnitus more than 80 percent of the time; slightly more than one in four describe their tinnitus as loud; and about one in five describe their tinnitus as disabling or nearly disabling, the BHI study found.
People with tinnitus report that it most often affects their ability to hear (39%), concentrate (26%), and sleep (20%). Yet for many, tinnitus is even more pervasive. Twelve percent of respondents—or 3.6 million people when extrapolated to the general population—say their tinnitus affects leisure activities, social life, personal relationships, and emotional or mental health. Seven percent of respondents—or an estimated 2.1 million people nationwide—indicate that tinnitus affects their ability to work.
How Hearing Aids Help
In addition to improving hearing and communication, hearing aids amplify background sound, so the loudness or prominence of the tinnitus is reduced. Simply taking the focus off the tinnitus means relief for many people. Hearing aids also reduce the stress associated with intensive listening by improving communication, which in turn help relieve tinnitus symptoms.
About Tinnitus Awareness Week
Each year, a week is set aside during Better Hearing Month to focus specifically on increasing public awareness about tinnitus and most importantly the need for increased funding for tinnitus research. This year, ATA is “going for gold” in its efforts to raise awareness and encourage people across the United States and around the world to help educate people about “ringing in the ears.” The premiere TAW 2012 event is the Tour de Tinnitus, a new bike ride fundraiser for the organization that was started last year by long time ATA member Mark Church. His efforts last year spawned great interest and the ride has grown to incorporate five new teams that will participate in four separate rides to raise money to support tinnitus research.
ATA has developed a TAW 2012 section on their website at ATA.org/TAW2012. From requesting proclamations from locally and nationally elected officials, to contacting your local media outlets, sharing tinnitus-related crosswords and posters, ATA has all the information you’ll need to get started in raising some serious tinnitus-awareness!
About BHI
Founded in 1973, BHI conducts research and engages in hearing health education with the goal of helping people with hearing loss benefit from proper treatment. For more information on hearing loss, visit www.betterhearing.org. To take the BHI Quick Hearing Check, visit www.hearingcheck.org. To participate in the discussion forum, visit www.betterhearing.org, click on “Discussion Forum,” and go to “Welcome!” to register.
April 30th, 2012 - Categories: Advice, Common Hearing Loss Myths - Tags: advice audigy, communication issues, community awareness, hearing loss, hearing loss and cognitive function, hearing treatment, patient care, sound void - No Comments
SoundVoids™ can cause unnecessary frustration in visiting with your loved ones.
Here at Advanced Hearing Care, I spend a lot of time counseling patients and their families and friends on realistic expectations for hearing treatment and rehabilitation. Some of the conversations can be quite passionate, especially when the family can’t understand why their loved one cannot seem to hear them, even though they’re wearing their hearing aids. After all, hearing aids are supposed to fix the problem, right?
Well, no, not really. Hearing aids are wonderful devices that supplement bad hearing. They help a person make the most of the hearing that they may have left. But they are not a substitute for good hearing. Nothing, no magic pill or surgery, can restore a person’s hearing to the way it was before the hearing loss occurred.
How Hearing Works
One of the biggest reasons why people have this misconception of hearing aids and hearing treatment is that they don’t really understand how hearing works or what is happening when someone has a hearing loss. After all, your ears just work, right? And you don’t have to think about it to make them work. So, most people just don’t have reason to think about it.
Like most of your senses, hearing requires a means of collecting stimuli and a method of delivering the data from those stimuli to the brain for processing. Your ears act as a funnel to collect sound waves in your environment and then both amplify and transform those sound waves into an electrical signal that can be processed by your brain. This process involves the outer ear, called the pinna; the ear canal; the middle ear, which is made of the ear drum and the ossicular bones; the inner ear, or cochlea; and the auditory nerve and brain. Along the way, the ear drum converts sound waves into mechanical energy, the stapes and cochlea convert the mechanical energy into hydraulic energy, and the cilia in the cochlea converts the hydraulic energy into electrical energy, which is finally processed by the auditory cortex in the brain.
A Matter of Physics
Sounds are formed anytime an object creates a vibration. These vibrations are called sound waves and they happen at a molecular level in every substance that has matter and mass. A good way to visualize this is to drop a pebble in a pond and watch the waves it creates. As mentioned above, the ear collects these sound waves in order to amplify and transform them into signals in the brain.
Generally speaking, the less complicated the sound environment, the easier it will be for the brain to sort through the sound waves available. In a small quiet room, there is very little interference from other sources of sound waves, there are fewer barriers to sound wave transmission, and the sound waves don’t have to travel very far to the ear. This is an ideal situation for hearing. The larger the space, the more sources of interfering background noise, the farther away you are from a reflective surface, the harder it will be to hear, even with normal hearing. Imagine again the pond and the pebble. The sound waves are a lot easier to “see” in a small pond with just a few pebbles than they are in an ocean during a rain storm.
Hearing aids cannot change the physics of environmental sound. There are certain properties to background noise, such as frequency ranges and harmonic patterns, that a hearing aid processor can be programmed to reduce, but it doesn’t work like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Those headphones have a distinct signal input from an audio device and a distinct sound pattern for the noise collected through a microphone. The headphones produce an inverse sound wave that cancels the noise. With hearing aids, the signal is mixed in with the noise and there’s no way to produce that inverse sound wave.
Mucking Up the Works
When hearing loss occurs, something happens to the anatomy of the ears and brain that causes the sound wave conversion and amplification process to not work the way it’s supposed to work. One of the most common problems is that the cilia in the cochlea, the part of the hearing that sends those electrical signals to your brain, begin to die. This is called sensorineural hearing loss. It is nerve damage and it is permanent.
This kind of hearing loss also often involves an issue with sound clarity in addition to the inability to detect certain sounds. In the case of someone who has those sound clarity issues, something is happening in the brain that causes the electrical signals that the brain receives to become garbled and distorted. When a person is experiencing this distortion, simple amplification of sound doesn’t help as much as you might think. After all, making a garbled sound louder does not improve its clarity. Since the distortion is actually happening in the brain, it is different for each person who experiences it and it cannot be easily measured or quantified, making compensation practically impossible.
So What Can I Do?
There are small things that you can do while you are speaking to make it easier for your loved one to understand you. Slow down and speak clearly; don’t shout! Shouting only distorts your speech. Rather than repeating a misunderstood word or phrase to the point of frustration, use different phrasing to avoid that misunderstanding. Make sure that you’re not speaking with your mouth full or obstructing your mouth with your hand or another object.
The best thing that can be done to help someone who has sound clarity and processing issues is to make the listening environment as simple as possible. First, turn off all potential sources of interfering noise. If it can’t be turned off, then turn it down or adjust its position to minimize the interference. Get on the same level as the person with the hearing loss and face them so you can speak directly to them. Move closer to them and stay within 4 to 6 feet. Never walk away from them while you’re talking or try to talk to them from another room in the house. Small environmental changes can do a lot to assist someone who is having trouble understanding speech.
In Closing
It’s very important to remember that hearing loss is a permanent impairment and the goal of any hearing loss treatment process is to make the most of an individual’s remaining hearing. In even a best-case scenario, there are limitations to what hearing technology can do as far as speech enhancement and background noise reduction in very complex listening situations. No matter how much the technology advances, no matter how far it develops or how sophisticated it gets, it will never be a replacement for the hearing that you or your loved one enjoyed had before the hearing loss. For more tips and tricks, feel free to visit our Communication Tips page, or Contact Us with any questions you may have.
April 19th, 2012 - Categories: Advice, News - Tags: advice audigy, community awareness, hearing conservation, patient care - No Comments
By: Bettie Borton, Au.D., FAAA
Doctor of Audiology
Doctors Hearing Clinic
7025 Halcyon Park, Suite A
Montgomery, AL 36117
(334) 396-1635
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www.doctorshearingclinic.com
Have you ever wondered if your children or grandchildren are damaging their hearing by using personal listening devices, cell phones, or by listening to loud music that’s too loud? Most of us look at the noisy environment that envelopes young people today, and can’t help but worry about this as potentially hazardous to their hearing.
We often think of hearing loss as a problem affecting only older Americans. However, a stunning one in five teens has lost a little bit of hearing, and the problem has increased substantially in recent years, a new national study has found. Audiologists and hearing healthcare researchers are urging teenagers to turn down the volume on their digital music players, suggesting loud music delivered through earbuds may be to blame. Although definitive evidence is lacking about the cause, experts warn that slight hearing loss can cause problems in school and set the stage for increased hearing loss in later life.
Our hope is we can encourage people to be careful,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Gary Curhan of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Researchers here analyzed data on 12 to 19 year-olds from a nationwide health survey. They compared hearing loss in nearly 3,000 kids tested from 1988-94 to nearly 1,800 kids tested over 2005-06.
The prevalence of hearing loss increased from about 15 percent to 19.5 percent. Most of the hearing loss was “slight,” defined as inability to hear at 16 to 24 decibels – or sounds such as a whisper or rustling leaves. A teenager with slight hearing loss might not be able to hear water dripping or his mother whispering “good night.”
Extrapolating this data to the nation’s teen population, that would mean about 6.5 million young people with at least slight hearing loss. Those with slight hearing loss “will hear all of the vowel sounds clearly, but might miss some of the consonant sounds” such as t, k and s, Curhan said. “Although speech will be detectable, it might not be fully intelligible,” he said. While the researchers didn’t single out iPods or any other device for blame, they found a significant increase in high-frequency hearing loss, which they said may indicate that noise caused the problems. And they cited a 2010 Australian study that linked use of personal listening devices with a 70 percent increased risk of hearing loss in children. Theses findings recently appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Loud music isn’t new, of course. Each new generation of teenagers has found a new technology to blast music – from the bulky headphones of the 1960s to the handheld Sony Walkmans of the 1980s. But according to Dr. Brian Fligor, an audiologist at Harvard Medical School, today’s young people are listening longer, more than twice as long as previous generations; older technologies had limited battery life and limited music storage, he points out. And with the Apple iPod, users can set their own volume limits, but parents can use the feature to set a maximum volume on their child’s iPod and lock it with a code.
One of Fligor’s patients, 17-year-old Matthew Brady of Foxborough, Mass., recently was diagnosed with mild hearing loss. He has trouble hearing his friends in the school cafeteria. He ends up faking comprehension. “I laugh when they laugh,” he said.
Fligor believes Brady’s muffled hearing was caused by listening to an iPod turned up too loud and for too long. After his mother had a heart attack, Brady’s pediatrician had advised him to exercise for his own health. So he cranked up the volume on his music while walking on a treadmill at least four days a week for 30-minute stretches. One day last summer, he got off the treadmill and found he couldn’t hear anything with his left ear. His hearing gradually returned, but was never the same.
Often, young people turn their digital players up to levels that would exceed federal workplace exposure limits. In Fligor’s own study of about 200 New York college students, more than half listened to music at 85 decibels or louder. That’s about as loud as a hair dryer or a vacuum cleaner. Habitual listening at those levels can turn microscopic hair cells in the inner ear into scar tissue, and for reasons that we don’t fully understand, some people may be more predisposed to damage than others; Fligor believes Brady is one of them. And remember, once damage is inflicted, it cannot be undone.
These days, Brady still listens to his digital player, but at lower volumes. His sage advice…”Do not blare your iPod,” he said. “It’s only going to hurt your hearing. I learned this the hard way.”
If you or a loved ones are concerned with a teen’s hearing or listening habits, contact Advanced Hearing Care for ideas or a complete audiological evaluation.
April 5th, 2012 - Categories: News, Research - Tags: advice audigy, community awareness, hearing loss, hearing loss and cognitive function, patient care, personalized solutions - No Comments
There are many reasons why having a regular hearing test is a good idea, even if you have normal hearing. Hearing is our most important social sense; it is what allows us to communicate with one another and connect with our friends, families, and loved ones. A yearly test is particularly important if you have other disorders which have been identified as possible causes of hearing loss, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and a history of certain infections, particularly in childhood.
As more research is conducted into the impact of hearing loss, we learn about exactly how insidious the disorder can be.
Hearing loss has also been identified as a risk factor for other disorders, particularly disorders that affect cognitive health. Four of these disorders are particularly important as a person continues to age:
- Dementia – Researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently found that individuals who have untreated hearing loss are significantly more likely to develop dementia time than those people who seek early treatment for their hearing loss. This relationship could be due to a number of factors, such as social isolation, increased cognitive strain or a similar underlying pathology.
- Brain Atrophy – This study was released by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers found that brain volume decreased among patients with untreated hearing loss, a condition that made it more difficult for those particular subjects to understand complex sentences.
- Depression – In 1999, a National Counsel on Aging survey of 2,300 hearing impaired adults age 50 and older found that those with untreated hearing loss were more likely to report depression, anxiety, and paranoia and were less likely to participate in organized social activities, compared to those who wear hearing aids.
- Risk of Falling – Though some people have issues with their hearing that involve their vestibular (balance) function, this study looks more at the direct nature between even a so-called mild hearing loss and fall risk. All other risk factors aside, a person with hearing loss is three times more likely to fall, and that risk increases dramatically as the hearing loss progresses.
These are just a few of the ways in which even a so-called mild hearing loss can affect a person’s lifestyle on a larger scale. A yearly hearing test, particularly for those patients with risk factors for hearing loss, can help insure that treatment is sought for the hearing loss when it is needed. Also, yearly tests can serve as valuable tools to monitor the progression of hearing loss over time, allowing any hearing aid prescribed to be appropriately fit to an individual’s hearing needs.
To schedule your yearly or baseline hearing test, call us today for an appointment. Our Four-Step Process is centered around discovering your individual hearing and listening needs, even if you just need a baseline examination. We have appointment times available Monday thru Friday, so we’re sure to have one that’s perfect for your busy schedule. Let us help you keep on top of your hearing health needs!
