Hearing Health Blog
Activity by special neurons called unipolar brush cells reveals that they may introduce delays or increase the length of firing responses, and presumably extend vestibular sensory representations.
Hearing loss affects more people than cancer or diabetes, yet it receives significantly less funding and research attention. Your support is helping us tackle this often overlooked health issue.
Most people love Halloween—costumes, treats, and going out late in the dark! But it can be scary, for real, for people who have balance or other sensory issues. Here are my tips for keeping your ghoul—I mean cool.
Have you ever felt dizzy, nauseous, or unsteady on your feet after leaving a loud concert? That could be the balance organ inside your inner ear reacting to the loud sounds.
The sensory organs that allow us to walk, dance, and turn our heads without dizziness or loss of balance contain specialized synapses that process signals faster than any other in the human body.
Patients with hearing loss in one ear appear to have more conscious control over their response to sensory cues in their environment, resulting in a more deliberate control of balance with less degrees of freedom to respond to changes in the environment, almost like a guarding behavior.
One challenge in studying vestibular organs is their location within the bony inner ear and their small size, especially in mice, which have become an advantageous mammalian model.
When a family member received a diagnosis of diabetes more than seven years ago, as an audiologist I tried to find information related to hearing problems associated with diabetes. I realized few people knew about the research connecting hearing loss and balance issues to this chronic disease.
Most activities of daily living require us to do two or more things at the same time, especially motor tasks (walking, standing, moving) with some form of a cognitive task (navigating, talking, decision-making). But it is not yet entirely clear what happens to balance performance in healthy individuals when they are also performing a cognitive task.
During my third year at University of Michigan, where I was studying biochemistry and French, I became aware of an unfamiliar, jarring sensation—extreme dizziness. If I closed my eyes for just a little bit, I’d feel my surroundings spinning. It was around the same time I recognized my difficulties hearing in large lecture halls.
