Tinnitus is the perception of ringing or buzzing in the ears, without an external sound source. As an audiologist, I have been treating it for nearly three decades. Here are five easy ways you can keep your ears as healthy as possible against tinnitus.
Filling in the Gaps
The annual meeting of Hearing Health Foundation’s (HHF) Hearing Restoration Project (HRP) was held in Seattle Dec. 12–14, 2019. As always, we use this extended in-person meeting to discuss in detail the progress of the consortium over the past year and to develop our plan for the upcoming year.
More Than Winning
With the help of my employer, OneLife Fitness, I scheduled the challenge for my 55th birthday at the gym. I chose to pair the event with a fundraiser for HHF on Facebook, where I was able to not only raise funds, but bring more awareness into the community about the good work of HHF.
Looking to Other Sensory Organs to Better Understand Hair Cell Regeneration
In a Sept. 25, 2019, article published in the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, Hearing Restoration Project (HRP) consortium member Tatjana Piotrowski, Ph.D., and colleagues at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Missouri summarize the existing literature on hair cell regeneration in the context of sensory cell regeneration more broadly.
No Excuses
Around the age of 3 and a half, my parents started noticing that I was always turning my right ear to the person speaking. Something wasn’t right. I was not reacting to sounds the way the typical hearing child should. My parents took me to my pediatrician who referred us to an audiologist. On September 28, 2000, at age 4, I was diagnosed with bilateral moderate-severe sensorineural hearing loss and immediately fitted with hearing aids.
Elizabeth Keithley, Ph.D., Honored With HHF Award
In October 2019, HHF awarded Elizabeth “Betsy” Keithley, Ph.D., a longtime Board of Directors member and chair emerita, its inaugural Collette Ramsey Baker Leadership Award. Keithley was honored for her decades of dedication to HHF, starting with the review of Emerging Research Grants proposals in the 1990s.
You Put Better Hearing Health in Reach
In 2019, HHF funded 21 major research projects, and our grantees published significant findings to advance our knowledge of TMC1 gene therapy delivery, the connections between tinnitus and hearing loss, the mechanics of speech processing, the diagnostics of Ménière's disease, and more. We could not be here without you.
Meet Braden Baker: How One Kid Raised Thousands for People in Need of Hearing Aids
It all started with Braden’s dog, Chewy, who chewed up a then 10-year-old Braden’s expensive hearing aids one warm, June night in 2017—for the second time. Born with a bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, Braden, a now 13-year-old Fort Worth, Texas native, has worn hearing aids since he was seven months old. It turns out, Chewy has expensive taste as custom hearing aids can run from $1,000 to a whopping $6,000 dollars per pair.
Have a Hearing Loss, in the Hospital?
Hospitals are full of older patients who are often hard of hearing, and data suggests that this affects healthcare outcomes. A study of patients in the Medicare system, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in 2018, compared readmission rates of patients who self-reported hearing loss with those who did not.
Watch This New Captioned Video from Our Hearing Restoration Project (HRP)
In October, the Scientific Director of Hearing Health Foundation (HHF)’s Hearing Restoration Project (HRP), Peter Barr-Gillespie, Ph.D., was the keynote speaker of The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS)’s “Hearing Restoration and Hair Cell Regeneration,” a symposium to connect internationally recognized hearing loss experts from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations.