Although it’s one of our most important connections to the world around us, most people don’t routinely monitor changes in their hearing, track exposure to excessive noise, or include hearing screenings as part of their regular preventative care.

With support from an R21 grant from the NIH, Hui Hong, Ph.D., will investigate how the auditory efferent system changes after noise-induced hearing loss and whether those changes help or hinder recovery.

Most people don’t think about protecting their hearing until it’s too late. Every concert, loud commute, and noisy day adds up—and there’s no undo button.

My brain now makes up music with a drone tone mostly in the key of D, pounding rhythms, melodies, and harmonies often in different keys.

When routine checkups missed our daughter’s hearing loss, we realized how families navigating an invisible disability can fall through the cracks. So we started to build the tools to help them.

Eventually I discovered something different: Living with chronic illness is about adapting to a new rhythm with your body. Here’s what I’ve learned.

While you can buy OTC hearing aids without a test, or use free online screening tools, I strongly recommend a comprehensive, in-person exam. A professional evaluation includes a physical inspection of your ears to catch hidden medical issues. 

One of the biggest sources of encouragement during those intense months after getting Shepherd’s diagnosis was hearing the stories of other families who had walked a similar path.

Cochlear implantation (CI) has become an increasingly common audiological solution for children with the most significant degree of unilateral hearing loss—that is, single-sided deafness (SSD)—however, highly variable outcomes are being observed with alarming rates of device nonuse. 

In theory, advanced hearing aid features are laudatory for sure, but what about affordability? Aren’t advances in technology supposed to lower prices, not increase them?

A new study suggests that variants of a single gene may alter inner ear development decades before symptoms begin.

Researchers are developing an organoid-on-a-chip system to model inner ear development and explore how damaged sensory hair cells might be regenerated.

I encourage families to pay attention not only to whether a loved one can “hear,” but whether they are fully participating in life.

When the doctor confirmed I had a hearing loss, I felt like a failure. Years later, my older sister pointed out our mother felt the same way. “How did I miss that?” my mother had wailed.

Music is my passion, and honestly, losing the ability to listen to it would feel like losing my whole heart. Protecting my hearing is such a small habit for something that pays off for the rest of your life.

What I found is that veteran tinnitus is clinically distinct from civilian tinnitus due to the severity of noise exposure and the augmenting effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and blast-induced traumatic brain injury. 

It took 20 years but Les Paul, who was born 111 years ago on June 9, 1915, forever changed music with his invention.

My advice for anyone starting this journey is to make sure that you know your limits so you don’t get into a situation that you can’t handle. Plus, make sure the people you’re interacting with know what you’re going through so they can help.

When Lucile was little a lot of parents would say to us, “Oh, she has such good manners. She looks you right in the eye.” They didn’t realize she was just very much focused on their faces and lips as they were talking!

Veterans, when compared to the general public, have had more occupational exposure to loud noises, such as gunfire and explosions.

Gene therapy for hearing loss has transitioned from a theoretical concept into a transformative clinical reality, albeit limited to specific cases of genetic hearing loss—for now. 

Over the years, I had a lot of conversations with patients sitting across from me—sometimes at a desk, sometimes just chatting while they waited. And no matter who they were, many of them were feeling the same things: frustrated, unsure, and sometimes a little overwhelmed.

For this mom, late in life diagnoses turned years of confusion into a clearer sense of self and deeper connections.

This path in parenting the hard of hearing—let’s face it—can be exhausting. If you walked alone, and because this disability is so often invisible, your village might not be on your front porch. You have to go hunting for it.

Our daughters, whose ears do not hear, opened my eyes more widely than ever before.

“We offer two versions for your brand of hearing aids. One is simply a microphone. The other includes a built‑in telecoil so people whose hearing aids don’t have telecoils can still connect to a hearing loop. Either one sends sound to the user’s hearing aids via Bluetooth.” 

Gaming can be one of those rare things where a parent and child actually connect on equal ground. But that bonding only works if both people can be part of the conversation. Hearing loss can make that moment impossible because one of them can’t hear the other.

Understanding how internal state interacts with cell-type-specific circuits in the auditory cortex may ultimately help identify therapeutic targets for tinnitus and related hearing disorders.

For Deaf and hard of hearing children, books and stories are vital spaces where they can see themselves, feel understood, find community and belonging, and lay the foundation for confidence and identity development that will set them up for success throughout their lives. 

What these findings make clear is that audiologists are carrying an enormous clinical load. Much of what surrounds that load does not require their specialized training.