The latest medical research on Audiologist

The study investigated the social-emotional functioning of children with typical hearing and deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) children from diverse cultural backgrounds in Israel through parental reports.

A total of 242 parents from both Arabic and Jewish communities participated: 130 were parents of D/HH children and 112 were parents of children with typical hearing. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and a background questionnaire were used.

Results revealed increased total difficulties, emotional symptoms, and peer problems as reported by parents of D/HH children. Jewish parents of D/HH children reported greater total difficulties, conduct problems, and peer problems than Arab parents. Significant gender differences were found, with parents of boys reporting higher levels of hyperactivity/inattention and lower prosocial behavior. Among D/HH children, Arab parents reported higher peer problems among hearing aid users compared to cochlear implant users, whereas Jewish parents reported the opposite trend.

These findings highlight the significant social-emotional challenges faced by D/HH children, particularly in peer interactions, and underscore the need for tailored interventions that consider cultural differences.

Listening effort is moderated by not only task difficulty, but also success importance. In real communication scenarios, success importance varies based upon the social context. However, in the laboratory, it can be challenging to manipulate social context without compromising experimental control. Outside of hearing sciences, studies have applied virtual reality (VR) to incorporate social context in a controlled and repeatable manner. Several of these studies have demonstrated that social manipulations in VR can reliably elicit changes in cardiovascular measures. Here, we investigated the effect of adding VR agents to a speech reception task, while measuring from the cardiovascular system.

Twenty-eight, normally hearing participants undertook a dichotic speech reception task. Sentences in stationary noise were presented dichotically, that is, different sentences presented simultaneously to each ear. Participants were tasked to either repeat one of the sentences (single-sentence condition) or both of the sentences (dual-sentence condition). The task was conducted under two VR conditions: (1) in the presence of agents, who provided sporadic performance feedback and (2) in the presence of nonagent controls, without any feedback given. Alongside task performance, we quantified changes in cardiovascular measures, relative to pretask baselines: heart rate variability, pre-ejection period, heart rate, and blood pressure. After each condition, participants rated their subjective effort, difficulty, performance, and engagement.

Performance and the subjective perception of performance were lower, while subjective effort and difficulty were higher, in the dual-sentence condition, compared with the single-sentence condition. Heart rate was the only cardiovascular measure that was sensitive to the experimental manipulations. Contrary to our expectations, heart rate increased in the nonagent control conditions, compared with the agent conditions. An exploratory analysis revealed heart rate fluctuations within a trial: heart rate was higher during the first 6 sec of the trial (reflecting the presentence masking noise and the sentence presentation) in the dual-sentence condition, compared with the single-sentence condition.

This study was the first to incorporate VR agents who provided performance feedback during a dichotic speech reception task. Our results suggest that the VR agents did not increase success importance, which could be attributed to a lack of realism of the agents. We also demonstrated that the cardiovascular response to experimental manipulations may differ depending on the data window selected for analysis.

The purpose of the present study was to use a large swallowing database to explore and compare the swallow-physiology impairment profiles of five dysphagia-associated diagnoses: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), dementia, head and neck cancer (HNC), Parkinson's disease (PD), and stroke.

A total of 8,190 patients across five diagnoses were extracted from a de-identified swallowing database, that is, the Modified Barium Swallow Impairment Profile Swallowing Data Registry, for the present exploratory cross-sectional analysis. To identify the impairment profiles of the five diagnoses, we fit 18 partial proportional odds models, one for each of the 17 Modified Barium Swallow Impairment Profile components and the Penetration-Aspiration Scale, with impairment score as the dependent variable and diagnoses, age, sex, and race as the independent variables with interactions between age and diagnoses and between PD and dementia (in effect creating a PD with dementia [PDwDem] group). For components with > 5% missingness, we applied inverse probability weighting to correct for bias.

PD and COPD did not significantly differ on 13 of the 18 outcome variables (all ps > .02). Dementia, stroke, and PDwDem all showed worse impairments than COPD or PD on five of six oral components (all ps < .007). HNC had worse impairment than all diagnoses except PDwDem for nine of 10 pharyngeal components (all ps < .006). Stroke and HNC had worse penetration/aspiration than all other diagnoses (all ps < .003).

The present results show that there are both common and differing impairment profiles among these five diagnoses. These commonalities and differences in profiles provide a basis for the generation of hypotheses about the nature and severity of dysphagia in these populations. These results are also likely highly generalizable given the size and representativeness of the data set.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27478245.