The loss of hearing - be it gradual or acute, mild or severe, present since birth or acquired in older age - can have significant effects on one's communication abilities, quality of life, social participation, and health. Despite this, many people with hearing loss do not seek or receive hearing health care. The reasons are numerous, complex, and often interconnected. For some, hearing health care is not affordable. For others, the appropriate services are difficult to access, or individuals do not know how or where to access them. Others may not want to deal with the stigma that they and society may associate with needing hearing health care and obtaining that care. Still others do not recognize they need hearing health care, as hearing loss is an invisible health condition that often worsens gradually over time. In the United States, an estimated 30 million individuals (12.7 percent of Americans ages 12 years or older) have hearing loss. Globally, hearing loss has been identified as the fifth leading cause of years lived with disability. Successful hearing health care enables individuals with hearing loss to have the freedom to communicate in their environments in ways that are culturally appropriate and that preserve their dignity and function. Hearing Health Care for Adults focuses on improving the accessibility and affordability of hearing health care for adults of all ages. This study examines the hearing health care system, with a focus on non-surgical technologies and services, and offers recommendations for improving access to, the affordability of, and the quality of hearing health care for adults of all ages.

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Americans are accustomed to anecdotal evidence of the health care crisis. Yet, personal or local stories do not provide a comprehensive nationwide picture of our access to health care. Now, this book offers the long-awaited health equivalent of national economic indicators. This useful volume defines a set of national objectives and identifies indicatorsâ€"measures of utilization and outcomeâ€"that can "sense" when and where problems occur in accessing specific health care services. Using the indicators, the committee presents significant conclusions about the situation today, examining the relationships between access to care and factors such as income, race, ethnic origin, and location. The committee offers recommendations to federal, state, and local agencies for improving data collection and monitoring. This highly readable and well-organized volume will be essential for policymakers, public health officials, insurance companies, hospitals, physicians and nurses, and interested individuals.

Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.

Hearing Instrument Technology for the Hearing Healthcare Professional, 2E brings together modern material for the highly specialized are of hearing instrument acousticians in hearing instrument technology. Beginning with an overview of hearing instrument technology from the beginning to the "digital" era, the text covers hearing instrument types and statistics on these instruments, hearing instrument measurements, transducers, acoustic modifications, hearing instrument functions, accessories, and troubleshooting, digital hearing instruments, and audiological background.

Tele-audiology, a blanket term for digital health solutions in audiology and auditory rehabilitation, including education and training, has recently been gaining pace, partly driven by commercial developments in remote otoscopy, remote audiometry, and hearing aids that can be adjusted by a remote professional. Due to these advances, clinicians have the potential to expand their practices and better serve patients in rural areas. However, audiologists are reluctant to use tele-audiology. Tele-Audiology and the Optimization of Hearing Healthcare Delivery is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of technologies that advance audiology and auditory rehabilitation, and allows healthcare providers to offer hearing healthcare at a distance and in a manner that provides appropriate outcomes and reduces delivery costs. This publication examines research findings from real-world experience of tele-audiology and covers topics including eHealth, security management, and internet interventions. It is ideally designed for audiologists, speech pathologists, care providers, medical professionals, academicians, and researchers.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. ​This handbook synthesizes and analyzes the growing knowledge base on life course health development (LCHD) from the prenatal period through emerging adulthood, with implications for clinical practice and public health. It presents LCHD as an innovative field with a sound theoretical framework for understanding wellness and disease from a lifespan perspective, replacing previous medical, biopsychosocial, and early genomic models of health. Interdisciplinary chapters discuss major health concerns (diabetes, obesity), important less-studied conditions (hearing, kidney health), and large-scale issues (nutrition, adversity) from a lifespan viewpoint. In addition, chapters address methodological approaches and challenges by analyzing existing measures, studies, and surveys. The book concludes with the editors’ research agenda that proposes priorities for future LCHD research and its application to health care practice and health policy. Topics featured in the Handbook include: The prenatal period and its effect on child obesity and metabolic outcomes. Pregnancy complications and their effect on women’s cardiovascular health. A multi-level approach for obesity prevention in children. Application of the LCHD framework to autism spectrum disorder. Socioeconomic disadvantage and its influence on health development across the lifespan. The importance of nutrition to optimal health development across the lifespan. The Handbook of Life Course Health Development is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians/professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology/science; maternal and child health; social work; health economics; educational policy and politics; and medical law as well as many interrelated subdisciplines in psychology, medicine, public health, mental health, education, social welfare, economics, sociology, and law.

Evidence based practice (EBP) has proponents in all areas of healthcare and was endorsed in a technical report in 2004 and a position statement in 2005 by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Despite this, there is no text on EBP with specific application to audiology. It is particularly important in audiology, where there are various interventions to assist people with hearing impairment and a growing body of research evidence that needs to be appraised by clinicians and researchers. This comprehensive book describes the principles of EBP as they apply to the evaluation of audiologic interventions in children and adults. The reader will learn the process of EBP, as well as gain knowledge on the evidence relating to specific interventions. Evidence Based Practice in Audiology is divided into four sections. The first section describes principles of EBP, including how to evaluate evidence and how to facilitate evidence based decisions with clients. The remaining three sections provide a discussion of the best available evidence about hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other interventions. These three sections contain chapters written by leading international authors who summarize the best available evidence, highlight where further evidence is needed, and recommend how further evidence should be collected and applied in the clinic. The book ends with an appendix that contains recommended measures for the collection of evidence about different audiologic interventions. Evidence Based Practice in Audiology is a highly valued resource for students, researchers, clinical audiologists, other health professionals and policy makers. For students, the book can be used for learning about research methods and about outcomes of interventions for children and adults with hearing impairment. For researchers, the book provides a useful summary of available research on important topics in habilitation and rehabilitation and may assist them to design future research studies. For clinical audiologists, the book can help them understand what evidence is and how this can be applied in clinical practice. Other health professionals who can benefit from this book include ENTs, pediatricians, geriatricians, GPs, nurses, and aged care workers. The book can also guide policy makers and third-party payers in their decisions about allocation of resources. The text is written with sufficient information for readers with different backgrounds and experience and careful attention has been paid to presenting complex information in an easy to understand format. Evidence Based Practice in Audiology is edited by two leading academics in research in audiologic interventions. These editors have a rich clinical experience working with children and adults with hearing impairment and with other health professionals

Cochlear Implants: Audiologic Management and Considerations for Implantable Hearing Devices provides comprehensive coverage of the audiological principles and practices pertaining to cochlear implants and other implantable hearing technologies. This is the first and only book that is written specifically for audiologists and that exhaustively addresses the details involved with the assessment and management of cochlear implant technology. Additionally, this book provides a through overview of hybrid cochlear implants, implantable bone conduction hearing technology, middle ear implantable devices, and auditory brainstem implants. Key Features: Each chapter features an abundance of figures supporting the clinical practices and principles discussed in the text and enabling students and clinicians to more easily understand and apply the material to clinical practice.The information is evidence based and whenever possible is supported by up-to-date peer-reviewed research.Provides comprehensive coverage of complex information and sophisticated technology in a manner that is student-friendly and in an easily understandable narrative form.Concepts covered in the narrative text are presented clearly and then reinforced through additional learning aids including case studies and video examples.Full color design with numerous figures and illustrations. Cochlear Implants is the perfect choice for graduate-level courses covering implantable hearing technologies because the book provides a widespread yet intricate description of every implantable hearing technology available for clinical use today. This textbook is an invaluable resource and reference for both audiology graduate students and clinical audiologists who work with implantable hearing devices. Furthermore, this book supplements the evidence-based clinical information provided for a variety of implantable hearing devices with clinical videos demonstrating basic management procedures and practices.

Binaural interference occurs when the speech input to one ear interferes with the input to the other ear during binaural stimulation. The first published study on binaural interference twenty-five years ago demonstrated that some individuals, particularly older individuals, perform more poorly with two hearing aids than with one and/or more poorly with binaural than monaural stimulation on electrophysiologic as well as behavioral measures. Binaural interference is relevant to every audiologist because it impacts the successful use of binaural hearing aids and may explain communicative difficulty in noise or other challenging listening situations in persons with normal-hearing sensitivity as well as persons with hearing loss. This exciting new book written by two highly respected audiologists first traces the history of its study by researchers, then reviews the evidence, both direct and indirect, supporting its reality. This is followed by a discussion of the possible causes of the phenomenon and in-depth analysis of illustrative cases. The authors outline a systematic approach to the clinical detection, evaluation and amelioration of individuals who exhibit binaural interference. Suggestions are furnished on improved techniques for evaluation of the binaural advantage in general and on sensitized detection of the disorder in particular. The book ends with recommendations for future directions. Given the adverse impact of binaural interference on auditory function and its occurrence in a significant subset of the population with hearing loss, as well as in some individuals with normal-hearing sensitivity, research on binaural interference only recently has begun to flourish, and adaptation of audiologic clinical practice to identify, assess, and manage individuals with binaural interference has yet to become widespread. The authors intend for the book to provide impetus for pursuing further research and to encourage audiologists to explore the possibility of binaural interference when patient complaints suggest it and when performing audiologic evaluations. The book is intended for practicing clinical audiologists, audiology students, and hearing scientists.