The Final Word of Shingles — Differential Diagnosis and Odds and Ends
Shingles in and around the ear and face is awful. This post series has belabored the pain and agony problem enough. The other big problem, the subject of this final post on the topic, is that it’s often very hard to diagnose and differentiate from other disease processes, especially in older patients. Here’s where the…
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Vascular Loops and Unilateral Hearing Loss
Last August, a post in this section described unusual findings in a patient with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss and retrocochlear findings who was referred for MRI to rule out acoustic neuroma. An acoustic neuroma is a benign, small, slow-growing tumor on the VIII cranial nerve–technically called a vestibular schwannoma. The MRI found no evidence of…
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The Vitamin Antioxidant Hearing Loss Studies
Last week’s post initiated a discussion of diet, specifically antioxidants and vitamins, as “… one of the few modifiable risk factors for age-related hearing loss” (Gopinath et al 2011). Today’s post summarizes salient features of several investigations of hearing loss and dietary risk factors which derive their findings from longitudinal epidemiological health studies of different subject…
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Aging and Hearing Loss: Data-Driven Studies for Consumers and Audiologists
For years, our field and industry have been bandying around rule-of-thumb statistics, chief among them that somewhere between 25-50% of people 65 and over have hearing loss that is sufficient to interfere with normal communication. Who knows where that statistic came from? It’s a heuristic that’s gained the mantel of truth over time. And the stated range of 25…
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All About Tinnitus for Consumers and Patients
Today’s topic is a vexious problem that gets far less attention by hearing health professionals than you would think. Tinnitus is a big issue for patients, but not one that is treatable by pills, surgery, or other traditional treatments. However, there are treatments that are effective for some people. What It Is Tinnitus…
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