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SIG [clear]
Instructional Level
Credit(s): PDHs: 1.0, ASHA CEUs*: 0.1
Summary: 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.
Credit(s): PDHs: 1.0, ASHA CEUs*: 0.1
Summary: 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.
Credit(s): PDHs: 5.0, ASHA CEUs*: 0.5
Summary: These SIG 12 Perspectives articles offer opportunities to extend augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) clinical practice through the inclusion of critical topic areas. They describe survey results and recommendations on disaster preparedness for SLPs to support people who use AAC; propose strategies for clinicians to create a “friendship mindset” in AAC assessment and implementation; offer strategies for designing and implementing Visual Scene Displays (VSDs) as a component within AAC systems for clients across the lifespan; and describe how perspectives of adult part-time AAC communicators support assessment and intervention with beginning communicators who have intermittent, unreliable, and inconsistent speech.
Credit(s): PDHs: 0.5, ASHA CEUs*: 0.05
Summary: 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.
Credit(s): PDHs: 3.5, ASHA CEUs*: 0.35
Summary: These SIG 12 Perspectives articles provide information on current issues associated with visual processing of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) displays for people with traumatic brain injury, assessment of the expressive language abilities of Spanish-speaking children who rely on AAC, and culturally sensitive approaches to aided language modeling. Readers will be more adept at designing effective AAC displays for adults with traumatic brain injury and at providing AAC services to children from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds.
Credit(s): PDHs: 4.0, ASHA CEUs*: 0.4
Summary: These SIG 12 Perspectives articles provide information on current issues associated with display design and image complexity for individuals with cortical visual impairment and an in-depth overview of telepractice for people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication. Readers will be more adept at assessing and assisting children with cortical visual impairment and will have a better understanding of telepractice methods that can be used to improve virtual service delivery.
Credit(s): PDHs: 3.0, ASHA CEUs*: 0.3
Summary: 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.