Pathways Symposium on CAPD: Bridging Science and Clinical Practice in Neuroaudiology

Welcome to this Week in Hearing. I’m Bob Traynor, your host for this episode. And today we’re here to discuss the second annual ‘Pathways: Quest for the Best in CAPD and, and Neuroaudiology’, a meeting that’s sponsored by Pathways and the University of Kentucky Department of Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery. My guest is Dr. Frank Musiek, a co director of this course. And I remember Frank, when we did this last year, things were so successful that now we’re doing a second annual version and now it’s an annual meeting that we’re going to be doing routinely. I think, Bob, that you hit the nail on the head is that we talked about this last year and certainly we had an overwhelming response to the point that Jen Shin and I, Jen, who’s a co director of this, said, you know, we’ve got to do this again. And that’s favorable all the way around because of the fact that I think it is important to maybe have something annually in the spring. And we decided to go ahead and do this this year. And so I’m glad to be able to talk with you a little bit about the program. But before we go there, I have to say that Bob, I’m glad to see you that you’re not in the courtroom and I don’t want people to take that the right way or the wrong way. But of course your work in forensic audiology is becoming pretty popular also. And Well, I’m just glad to see that you know, they aren’t putting you behind bars or anything, but rather you’re echoing some of the interest in audiologists in forensic audiology. So I wanted to at least mention that to you. Well, thanks, Frank. Thats really kind. We think in our group now we call our group of people that are in forensics, or at least our small little five guy group, call ourselves the ‘Hearsay Group’. And so as long as I’m not sitting in the defendant seat I’ll feel much more comfortable about where we are. So I think it’s an up and coming area of audiology practice that is open to people with good experience and orientation in certain areas and in particular CAPD. So can you tell us a little bit about this year’s program for the conference? Yeah, well, you know Bob, this year we are concentrating primarily on intervention. Intervention for those that have difficulty in terms of auditory processing and that as it relates to neuro, audiology and similar types of things. And the reason that we picked that was just a little bit because of the fact that Jen Shinn is actively involved in this, and I was for many years, and our faculty is. But also because it was echoed from many of the people that we had talked to over the past year and some questionnaires that we sent out to get some feedback. And clearly there is an interest, as there has been for many years, in terms of the aural rehab or the intervention, auditory training and what have you for those that have CAPD, both in terms of the pediatric population and also the adult population. And so Jen said, you know, we should really just focus on this aspect of CAPD, because certainly there’s enough information out there about that. And in fact, if I can say one other thing about that is for many years, and even now there are audiologists who have an interest in this. But they always come up to me or someone else who’s maybe lecturing about this and they say, well, it’s great that you can do all these diagnostics, but then what do you do with them once you make the diagnosis? And that is really misplaced Information. Because there is a lot of information out there, not just in our field, but especially in the neuroscience fields where they’re shown plasticity of the brain, especially via the auditory network is really a major player that can improve the auditory perception of various kinds of signals. So I want, right out of the gate, I just want to say that there are things that can be done out there and we’re going to focus on those in a very practical manner in this upcoming mini symposium. Hopefully some of those people that say, yeah, you can, you can find us there, but what are you going to do about it? Maybe you can take some of those people. Hopefully those are the ones that, that will be. Have some interest in the conference. I know that’s one of the reasons that I registered for the conference the other day. And I think that those who still think that there’s nothing you can do about it need the conference very , very much as part of their practice. So an overview. Can you give me a little bit of an idea who the faculty are and a little bit of the specifics of the program here? Frank? I mean, even as not a very specialized person in CAPD, I recognize about three fifths of the faculty. And so I’m interested not only in hearing from them, but Also the other colleagues that are involved with this meeting. Yeah, I’m glad to do that Bob. And it’s important part of an introduction to this mini symposium. And I like to talk about the faculty because they are all good friends of mine and I’ve watched their work for many years and they are really outstanding clinicians but they are also very fine researchers. And when we choose a faculty that’s what we try to do is we try to find people that have been in the clinic, are in the clinic, active in the clinic, but also have a very, very strong research side. Blending the two is what I think is a chief, how shall we say, telemarketer for our considering selecting the faculty. So we have Teri Bellis who I know you have some background with. And Teri was a postdoc of mine at Dartmouth and has done all outstanding work and she will be kicking things off and be a member of our faculty. Talking somewhat about dichotic training and some of the interesting work that she’s done, data driven work that she’s done in this field. And as most people know she’s a very engaging speaker and brings a relative important import to the various aspects of rehabilitation especially in terms of the school age kids that she’s had a great deal of experience with. So we’re very happy to have Teri with us and we’ve interacted over the years for many, many different conferences. We also have and this is a real treat, we have Vivian Iliadu who is an MD, PhD, who primarily is in auditory and is a clinical person as well as a top flight research individual. Very unique credentials, very bright person and really a very engaging speaker with certainly background that delves into the medical aspects of some of these kinds of problems for which there is some very intriguing research that she’s done including some work on the psychiatric patients who have APD. And so I think the audience participants will be in for a real treat in listening to Vivian who is from Aristotle University in Greece. So she’ll be tuning in actually in the late afternoon while we’re over here in the morning. But Vivian is a top flight person all the way around clinical and in terms of basic science. Gail Whitelaw from Ohio State has been doing this kind of work for a long time and she brings a nice aspect to the program because she’s going to talk about amplification and how carefully selected amplification can in fact be a help to these individuals, both adult and children who have APD. You know for a long time it was considered that amplification was just absolutely a no no in terms of individuals had central auditory involvement. And that still holds true to a large extent. But there’s been a groundswell of, of work that’s been done on you know high quality high fidelity hearing aids with very low gain that in fact do help these individuals with CAPD. And Gail’s been right on top of that and has done a lot of really excellent work in that regard. So we’re all anxious and looking forward to hearing Gail Whitelaw talk about that. And then of course we have Jennifer Shinn who was one of our co, my co directors and she’s lined up what I think is going to be a really nice situation in terms of individual case studies. But you know Jennifer. Jennifer is a top flight researcher. She was my PhD student. I worked with her for a couple years at Dartmouth before she was my PhD student at the University of Connecticut. And I’ve watched her her you know, career grow really really well. She has a chair in audiology at the University of Kentucky which is extremely rare. As my old professor once said that’s about as rare as hen’s teeth. You don’t see too many people have university granted shares in audiology but Jen Shinn has one and certainly we’re glad to have her on the on the faculty. And then I’ll be around to fill in the gaps here and there and present some new and old data that we’ve looked at that is becoming pretty popular right now. So that’s primarily the faculty. And the overview of the program kind of fits that there will be a focus on general types of auditory problems that people have. That will be covered. Were going to dwell quite a bit on dichotic training. I did work on that way back starting with some of the split brain work that we did. That’s where it was generated. And both Teri Bellis and I will both be talking about the dichotic intensity training that can be done with these people that have dichotic deficits driving their APD and so that hopefully will turn out very well and direct a lot of people to what we think is a real interesting and I would say formidable training exercise for the alleviation of dichotic deficits in APD. You know the thing that got me interested so much Frank. Yeah. Was that that you and Dr. Shinn have put together a program that seems. Because usually when you go to the, some of these meetings you get all this esoteric stuff about, about essential anatomy and physiology and a lot of those things. But, but nobody really talks about how you use it in the clinic and with, with colleagues that are still saying you can’t do much about it. And you guys are taking this and taking the basic sciences and putting it together with clinical sciences to really facilitate kind of a, kind of an overall assessment and then what do you do about it kind of orientation to the conference. Yeah, that, that has been our focus and that is one of the things that we’ve tried to do and we hope we do a good job of it. We have the people that have the talent to do that and I think that’s kind of where it starts. And that’s what I’ve alluded to earlier on is that they’re oriented towards the research as well as they have extensive clinical experience. So yeah, I think that that’s very important and I think that’s something that has been missing in some of the programs. And I think hopefully we will be able to fill that void with the faculty we have and with the topics that we are including in this particular program. You know, there is actually a smooth, or should be a smooth transition if it’s presented well, between the basic science, science and the origin of some of our ideas in the science realm to the clinical. And that doesn’t always happen. And I think right now now that all programs and most of what we do in audiology and other affiliated type disciplines is really under the microscope. And we have to be able to provide not just clinical ideas and clinical shall we say notions that work, but we need to be able to ground it well with science because otherwise one, it really shouldn’t be believed until we have both of those areas covered. And second of all, a lot of people are looking at audiology now in terms of you know, what, what is, what is their basis and where are we going with this and do we do more than just hearing aids? And I think that that is one of the things that’s driving us in terms of our orientation. Okay. One of the questions of the, of the moment will we be able to obtain CEUs for this conference? Absolutely. We just got the approval for that for ASHA CEUS and the transfer of those it’s going to be for. We’re still debating a little bit. We think it’s worth four hours, but they said only 3.5. You can count on 3.5. And if we get that other half hour in there someplace, we will. But yeah, definitely you can count on CEUs. And of course those are important right now for a lot of reasons. And So yes, we can provide that. Yeah. And again really what we should be after is the melding of the science and the clinical science and putting that stuff together so we can bring it to the clinic the next day. And So when is this going to be offered? Is it a virtual conference? What are the costs? And, and is it all day or two days or, or tell us a little more about some of the specifics that we need to know. So to make this a reality in our schedule. Yeah. So Bob, you bring out some good points there and we can’t leave those out, that’s for sure. So a couple of things. One is that yes, we have CEUs and it’s on April 26, which is a Saturday. And we didn’t just pull that day out of the hat. We did some surveys on that, asked a lot of people about that. And interestingly Saturday for a lot of the clinicians who are working all week it turns out to be a pretty good day for it. So we are doing it on Saturday. It starts at 12:00 Eastern Time. And on the west coast that would be 9:00. So that’s when we start. It will last four hours. And again that was something that we just didn’t draw that draw out of a hat. But we did some questions and answers and some surveys to show us that well, you know, maybe we can accomplish most of what we want to accomplish in a very quick, targeted type four hour symposium. So that’s kind of where we are on that. And certainly if the Registration is only $35 for professionals and only $10 for students and there’s a lot behind that. You know, a year ago when we decided to do this, we wanted to do something that everybody could afford students that wasn’t a major drain because boy, everything is getting so expensive now in terms of programs and different conferences. We really wanted to make it available to at a very low cost. And we were banking on the fact that we would get a lot of people signed up for it and kind of make up the difference there. And we did. We got a lot of people so hopefully we’ll get a lot of people this year too. But those are the main things. And certainly if they want more information they can contact me you know, at just fmusiek@arizona.edu, or Jen Shinn at the University of Kentucky to get more information on it. But we encourage people to give this some serious consideration for attendance. Well, appreciate you looking at this week and hearing Frank to, For you and your co director to to tell the rest of us who maybe, maybe have been one of those people that said there’s not a lot you can do about it once you find it to. Okay, you guys are talking about those things. Come listen to what we do about this stuff these days because maybe you have a void in your literature or, or orientation to what’s happening. In the field of CAPD and Neuro Audiology. So again today my guest has been Dr. Frank Musiek, one of the co directors of the Pathways Quest for the Best in CAPD and Neuro Audiology. I hope you’ll join me for another join me and my audiology colleagues as we attend this CAPD Neuro Audiology meeting on April 26th at noon Eastern Daylight Time virtually. And thanks so much for being with us Frank, and the it’s just a pleasure to be part of helping my colleagues learn more about the area. An area that has escaped some of us over the years. Well Bob, thank you for inviting me on and we really appreciate the discussion about this and even our short discussion about forensic audiology. That’s great. I think we both have topics there that we’re interested in there that we talked about today, so thanks a lot. Thank you. Well, and the rest of you out there, thank you for being with me at this week in hearing.