November 30, 2007

This was the last week of clinic. I saw a few clients. One client I saw wanted his hearing re-evaluated because he had been in a car accident and thought his hearing had changed. He also wanted us to look as his hearing aids because they were not functioning properly. His hearing had changed a good bit. When we looked in his hearing aids, we saw that the one wax spring had been pushed completely down into the hearing aid and was lying on the receiver. We were not able to get it back out of the aid. Both hearing aids did not sound too good, and since they were 5 yrs old, we told him it would probably cost more to have them repaired than to just get new ones.

Since I didn't see anything too exciting, I wanted to find an article that was interesting. I found an article about hearing aids and the brain and the connection between the two. In the article, the researchers completed several experiments to see how amplified sounds are represented in the central auditory system. They expected to find that when sound is amplified by a hearing aid the neural response patterns would have been larger in amplitude and shorter in latency when compared with unaided neural responses; however, this was not the case. The article was very interesting and I highly suggested everyone takes a second to look over it.

Reference:
Billings, C.J., & Tremblay, K.L., (2007). Hearing aids and the brain: What's the connection? The ASHA Leader, (12(7), 5, 23.

If you would like to read this article, please copy the following link:
http://www.asha.org/about/publications/leader-online/archives/2007/070529/070529g.htm