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SIG Perspectives
Ototoxic medications and chemical agents in the workplace can put individuals' hearing
and vestibular health at risk for permanent injury. Proactive ototoxicity management
(OtoM) strategies aim to minimize exposure, avoid onset of symptoms, provide ongoing
monitoring, and manage auditory and vestibular changes as the clinical needs of the
patient evolve. During a 2021 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Special
Interest Groups Open House, members of the International Ototoxicity Management
Group discussed how best to integrate OtoM into routine clinical practice, what tools to
use, and what special considerations need to be understood to best support patients and
their families. Here, we have summarized their viewpoints to encourage widespread
adoption of improved OtoM services for at-risk individuals. The field of audiology needs
to move to a place where we better understand the full extent of ototoxicity and can
agree on expanding minimum guidelines that can be implemented more universally to
mitigate, detect, and manage the damage from ototoxic exposures. Only recently has
our field seen a therapeutic drug that can protect against ototoxicity; however, the
population served is restricted only to children receiving treatment for nonmetastatic
carcinoma. This is hopefully just the beginning of future therapeutic interventions to
come, but, in the meantime, ototoxicity resulting from other medications in different
patient populations and chemical agents persists.
Format(s):
SIG Perspectives
As a step toward developing an electrophysiologic method for validating the speech feature discrimination benefits of amplification, the article in this SIG 6 activity evaluates the effect of stimulus level and amplification on the acoustic change complex in adults with sensorineural hearing loss.
Format(s):
SIG Perspectives
The article in this SIG 6 activity focuses on the audiologic variations seen among patients undergoing the same type of ototoxic drug treatment (cisplatin). Results show a large amount of audiologic outcome variability among the two patients examined, despite similar demographic factors, drug treatments, and types of cancer. Factors relating to ototoxic susceptibility are discussed, and the importance of otoxicity monitoring programs for early detection of audiologic change is highlighted.
Format(s):
SIG Perspectives
These three articles describe current issues and advances related to hearing diagnostics, treatment, and prevention. The first article is a detailed description of the impact that COVID-19 face masks and social distancing regulations have had on speech recognition and how face masks affect the acoustic signal and increase cognitive effort in listeners with hearing loss. Suggestions for mitigating these deleterious impacts on communication are provided. The second article is a research study examining the correlation between self-perceived hearing difficulty, determined using a questionnaire (Adult Auditory Performance Scale), and speech-in-noise performance (Listening in Spatialized Noise–Sentences Test) in listeners with normal pure-tone thresholds. Results highlight the relationship between self-perceived hearing abilities and binaural speech-in-noise performance supporting the inclusion of speech-in-noise testing even in those with normal pure-tone thresholds. The third article is a review of current genetic, stem cell, and pharmacotherapy research for treatment and prevention of hearing loss. Animal models are discussed, as well as steps to translate this research into clinical practice.
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