Deafx

For millions of people, the quietest room is never quiet enough. Even when surrounded by silence, they can hear a ringing or buzzing in their ears that drives them to distraction. The sound is called tinnitus, and sufferers — often people with hearing trouble thanks to advanced age or loud sounds — are willing to go to great lengths to stop the noise. Some plead with their doctors to cut their hearing nerves completely, but even this drastic measure won't help. The few patients who have had the procedure could still hear their tinnitus — and nothing else. Tinnitus can sometimes be treated with electronic masking devices that help obscure the sound. And some patients find relief from cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of counseling that can encourage people to think about things other than their tinnitus. These approaches don't work for everyone, and they can be expensive, so it's no wonder that many people end up looking for tinnitus relief in a pill. Options include Quietus, ...

A girl who was born deaf is now speaking and has advanced language skills for her age after a life-changing operation. Ava Pearson was nine months old when she became one of the youngest people in Britain to have cochlear implants. Now aged three, she has language skills months ahead of other children her age and is doing well at nursery school. Her mother, Lauren, 31, from London, said: 'It was amazing to see her reacting to noise. I was so excited and felt such a sense of relief. Her hearing is improving every day and she has become such a chatterbox.' Mrs Pearson, a book publisher, and her husband Chris, a 31-year-old finance manager, first realised Ava was deaf when she didn’t react to routine hearing tests when she was three weeks old. After researching treatments on the internet, the Pearsons decided cochlear implants might give their daughter the chance of a normal life. One week after the operation, she started dancing to music and four weeks later she said her first word, â ...

A new treatment is giving partially deaf people the chance to hear the world around them better than they dreamed possible. The technique, known as a soft-surgery cochlear implantation, involves inserting an electrode into the inner ear of patients who have some residual hearing. The treatment was previously offered only to people with total or near-total hearing loss, also called profound deafness. But now, a doctor at Al Mafraq Hospital in the capital is confident that the surgery is safe enough to be performed on patients with some hearing without risk of further loss. Dr Mondy Hammad, the director of the cochlear implant programme at the hospital, said these patients could gain up to 80 per cent of normal hearing through the operation, which combines the acoustic hearing made possible with a hearing aid with the electric hearing provided by the implanted electrode. “This type of a procedure used to be available in the past three decades only to patients with total deafness becau ...

Joyce Bell of Attica recognized the tell-tale signs of hearing loss creeping up on her about a year ago. "I noticed I was having to say 'huh' and have people repeat themselves," the 67-year-old said. She also had to turn up the television really loud. But the main downside to hearing loss has been how it affects her social circle. Bell usually travels to restaurants and to play Bingo with her friends, who drive large vehicles. "I can't hear at all in the back seat," she said. "So I just quit going with them. I think I'm more of a stay at home person than what I was because it's just very difficult to hear." Hearing loss can make it difficult to understand conversations and affect someone's overall cognitive function or ability to think coherently through a situation, said Sandy Bratton, an audiologist with Indiana Neuro-Ophthalmology and Center for Balance in Lafayette. This in turn can adversely affect a person's ability to socialize, Bratton added. "It's takes so much energy to be a ...

Grade 9 student Cassandra Bell has thrived and excelled in school for nine years, despite being diagnosed in kindergarten with hearing loss that's deteriorated to deafness. But River East Transcona School Division's budget has chopped the division's lone teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing. That teacher "has been there since the day we found out Cassandra was deaf, nine years," said Cassandra's mother, Loretta Bell. Bell said the teacher is being transferred back into the classroom and her position is being dropped. The teacher worked with 50 students, seeing Cassandra at Robert Andrews School once every six days, Bell said. The division has always had resource teachers who've worked with Cassandra and other hearing-impaired students, but the teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing has specialized skills that Bell said cannot be replaced. "She got the division to put carpet down in the classroom to dampen down the noise. She brought in an interpreter" funded by the province for Ca ...

In the world of work, deaf and hard-of-hearing people are notably absent, at least in large numbers. Estimates vary on joblessness in the community, though a 2008 Cornell University study indicated 44 percent of working-age Americans with a hearing disability were unemployed. Pointing to entrepreneurship as a way to boost the financial fortunes of the deaf community, a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has started an investigation into the state of business creation in the deaf world. "This stemmed from a desire to ... find out how has entrepreneurship embedded itself in the deaf community and what can we do to promote it," said Richard DeMartino, director of RIT's Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and principal investigator in the study. RIT, through its National Technical Institute for the Deaf, long has had a focus on career training in the deaf community. And the school in 2007 created a $1.6 million scholarship fund, using federal and Johnson Scholarshi ...

A recent article in our business section caught my eye: "RIT examines deaf entrepreneurship." The article talked about the estimated 44 percent unemployment among people with a hearing disability and how RIT is studying entrepreneurship in the deaf community with an eye toward promoting it. So I thought I'd share my experience from two years ago when I supervised a deaf intern here. I was overseeing our custom content department (magazines, special sections, niche web sites) and a deaf RIT student applied for an internship as a copy editor. I was apprehensive at first, as I'd never worked closely with a deaf person before, but he had good experience on student publications so I wanted to give him a shot. It turned out to be such a wonderful experience - for him, me and my staff. The student was born deaf ("deaf as a stone" as he put it to us), grew up in Rochester and attended the School for the Deaf here. He was able to read lips and speak, but frankly, I never developed a good under ...

Katherine McCarrick is 14 but has the cognitive development of a 3-year-old. The Peoria teen is blind and deaf, making her needs so profound that her parents enrolled her two years ago at the Philip J. Rock Center and School in Glen Ellyn — the state's sole public facility serving children like her. But now, the west suburban facility may be forced to close in coming weeks because of the state's financial crisis. Peggy Whitlow, chief administrator of the Rock Center, said the state owes the facility about $1.7 million, or about half its annual funding, meaning she will not be able to pay her staff beyond April 15. "Our funding is basically exhausted," Whitlow said. State officials say they are discussing alternative placements for Katherine and the 13 other students who live at the facility. Opened in 1978, the Rock Center was named after the former president of the Illinois State Senate, a Democrat from Oak Park who played a key role in passing legislation to establish the school. ...

The discovery could lead to new tests to identify if deafness in their family is genetic and therefore if any future children would be at risk. An estimated one child in 750 is born profoundly deaf or with a severe hearing loss. In at least half of these children, the cause of deafness is genetic. The research was funded by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf and conducted in The Netherlands. It discovered that changes in the PTPRQ gene can lead to deafness after studying the genetics of families where several members had inherited childhood hearing loss. The research project compared the DNA of individual family members in order to identify regions in the DNA likely to contain the genes that cause deafness. Using this approach, the researchers discovered this and a further two new deafness-causing genes. All three genes are thought to play an important role in the development of the delicate inner ear hair cell, which is essential for hearing. Dr Sohaila Rastan, RNID’s Chief ...

For 40 years, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf has literally set the stage for thousands of students to participate in theater arts. Dance productions, original plays, poetry, musicals and Shakespeare are all performed in front of appreciative and entertained audiences. The words on stage are spoken in sign language at the same time another actor - often in the background - voices what is being signed, so hearing audience members as well as those knowing sign language can follow along. "NTID is one of a handful of places in the entire world that produce this form of theater," says Jim Orr, the theater's community relations and production manager and an integral member of NTID's Theater Department since 1984. "I think we're one of the best kept secrets around, but we do want everyone to know about us." NTID offers students a comprehensive choice of theater courses, design, history, dance and movement. A shop behind the Robert F. Panara Theatre is where you'll find students ...