News by Subject Medicine & Health

A recent study has shown that readers' eye gaze behaviors are strong indicators of words that are unexpected, new, or difficult to understand. The study by Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor and researcher in the Center for Sensory, Perceptual, and Cognitive Ecology (SPaCE Center) at Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, explores the unknown qualities of gaze behavior for 'sign watching' and how these are affected by a user's language expertise and intelligibility of the sign input.

Restoring normal patterns of rhythmic neural activity through non-invasive electrical stimulation of the brain alleviates sound-processing deficits and improves reading accuracy in adults with dyslexia, according to a study published September 8, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Silvia Marchesotti and Anne-Lise Giraud of the University of Geneva, and colleagues.

New Edith Cowan University (ECU) research has found that intensive therapy is not necessarily best when it comes to treating the loss of language and communication in early recovery after a stroke.

With six mutations in genes associated with hearing, naked mole-rats can barely hear the constant squeaking they use to communicate with one another. This hearing loss, which is strange for such social, vocal animals, is an adaptive, beneficial trait, according to new findings published in the journal Current Biology.

This essay highlights the lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic on the importance of recognizing communication difficulties among those with hearing impairment.

An international group of hearing specialists has released a new set of recommendations emphasizing that cochlear implants should be offered to adults who have moderate to severe or worse hearing loss much more often than is the current practice. The group hopes the recommendations help increase usage of such devices, potentially improving hearing and quality of life for millions worldwide.

Opioid use, particularly in high doses, can cause deafness, according to Rutgers researchers. The study, published in The Journal of Medical Toxicology, reviewed records from the New Jersey Poison Control Center, based at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, from 1999 to 2018 to determine the association between opioid use and degrees of hearing loss.

A new study from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus challenges a decades-old hypothesis on adaptation, a key feature in how sensory cells of the inner ear (hair cells) detect sound.

Researchers report the clinicopathologic and autopsy findings observed in the olfactory system of two patients with SARS-CoV-2-positive nasal swabs.