Search results for " AUDIT"
showing 10 items of 463 documents
Abnormal functioning of the left temporal lobe in language-impaired children
2014
Specific language impairment is associated with enduring problems in language-related functions. We followed the spatiotemporal course of cortical activation in SLI using magnetoencephalography. In the experiment, children with normal and impaired language development heard spoken real words and pseudowords presented only once or two times in a row. In typically developing children, the activation in the bilateral superior temporal cortices was attenuated to the second presentation of the same word. In SLI children, this repetition effect was nearly nonexistent in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, the activation was equally strong to words and pseudowords in SLI children whereas in the typi…
Serial measurements of transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) in healthy newborns and in newborns with perinatal infection.
1993
Detection of hearing impairment in early childhood is difficult. We serially recorded transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) to search for signs of ototoxicity in term, healthy newborns and compared the results to a second group of term babies treated for perinatally acquired bacterial infection with ampicillin plus either cefotaxime or plus aminoglycoside. At initial evaluation, in the group of 45 healthy children born at term, well reproducible emissions were observed in all but two children. In each of these two, initially well reproducible TEOAEs were detected in one ear only. At the time of the second recording (mean at day 8.5) excellent emissions were seen in all ears of all…
Prevalence and risk factors for sensorineural hearing loss: Western Sicily overview.
2013
The objective of this work was to evaluate the prevalence of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) and distribution of the main risk factors associated to it focusing on their role in the development of deafness and their interaction. We performed a global audiological assessment (through TEOAE, tympanometry and ABR) in 508 infants at risk studying the main risk factors reported by Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (2007). Fifty-one infants (10.03 %) were diagnosed with SNHL (45 bilateral and 6 unilateral) with a mean hearing threshold of 87.39 ± 28.25 dB HL; family history of hearing impairment (HI) and TORCH infections indicated independent significant risk factors (P < 0.00001 and P = 0.0…
The role of atopy in otitis media with effusion among primary school children: audiological investigation
2010
The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of atopy in otitis media with effusion (OME) in children attending primary school in western Sicily focusing on the audiological characteristics among atopic and non-atopic subjects suffering from OME. A total of 310 children (5-6 years old) were screened by skin tests and divided into atopics (G1) and non-atopics (G2). The samples were evaluated for OME by pneumatic otoscopy, tympanogram and acoustic reflex tests. The parameters considered were: documented persistent middle ear effusion by otoscopic examination for a minimum of 3 months; presence of B or C tympanogram; absence of ipsilateral acoustic reflex and a conductive hearing loss …
Quality standards for the management of bronchiectasis in Italy: A national audit
2016
Although historically considered a neglected disease, bronchiectasis has become a disease of renewed interest over recent decades in light of an increase in prevalence and a substantial burden on healthcare systems. In 2010, the British Thoracic Society (BTS) published guidelines on the management of bronchiectasis in adults, along with specific quality standards. To date, these represent the only quality standards available in Europe. These have been tested over a number of years in the UK with progressive improvements in the standard of care. No national guidelines are available in Italy and no indications on which guideline should be followed have been given by the Italian Society of Res…
BENEFITS OF MULTI-DOMAIN FEATURE OF MISMATCH NEGATIVITY EXTRACTED BY NON-NEGATIVE TENSOR FACTORIZATION FROM EEG COLLECTED BY LOW-DENSITY ARRAY
2012
Through exploiting temporal, spectral, time-frequency representations, and spatial properties of mismatch negativity (MMN) simultaneously, this study extracts a multi-domain feature of MMN mainly using non-negative tensor factorization. In our experiment, the peak amplitude of MMN between children with reading disability and children with attention deficit was not significantly different, whereas the new feature of MMN significantly discriminated the two groups of children. This is because the feature was derived from multi-domain information with significant reduction of the heterogeneous effect of datasets.
Enhancement of brain event-related potentials to speech sounds is associated with compensated reading skills in dyslexic children with familial risk …
2014
Specific reading disability, dyslexia, is a prevalent and heritable disorder impairing reading acquisition characterized by a phonological deficit. However, the underlying mechanism of how the impaired phonological processing mediates resulting dyslexia or reading disabilities remains still unclear. Using ERPs we studied speech sound processing of 30 dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia, 51 typically reading children with familial risk for dyslexia, and 58 typically reading control children. We found enhanced brain responses to shortening of a phonemic length in pseudo-words (/at:a/ vs. /ata/) in dyslexic children with familial risk as compared to other groups. The enhanced bra…
Auditory event-related potentials show altered hemispheric responses in dyslexia
2011
Dyslexia is characterized by deficits in phonological processing abilities. However, it is unclear what the underlying factors for poor phonological abilities or speech sound representations are. One hypothesis suggests that individuals with dyslexia have problems in basic acoustic perception which in turn can also cause problems in speech perception. Here basic auditory processing was assessed by auditory event-related potentials recorded for paired tones presented in an oddball paradigm in 9-year-old children with dyslexia and a familial background of dyslexia, typically reading children at familial risk for dyslexia and control children without risk for dyslexia. The tone pairs elicited …
Audiologic profile of infants at risk: experience of a Western Sicily tertiary care centre.
2012
Objective: To identify the incidence of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) on infant at risk and to classify the degree and type of hearing loss describing the main causes associated in Western Sicily. To compare single TEOAE and combined TEOAE/ABR techniques studying the referral rate, the false-positive and false-negative rates through concordance test (κ coefficient), sensitivity (TPR) and specificity (TNR) for each protocol. Methods: From January 2010 to June 2011, 412 infants at risk, ranging from 4 to 20 weeks of life, transferred to Audiology Department of Palermo from the births centers of Western Sicily, underwent to audiological assessment with TEOAE, tympanometry and ABR. The foll…
Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party
2016
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine stru…