A study by researchers at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis has found that children with hearing loss in one ear due to a certain deformity can struggle in school and socially because of it.

A normal ear (top left) is compared with various external ear malformations common in children born with aural atresia, the absence of an external ear canal. The condition typically only affects one ear. (photo courtesy; the National Institutes of Health)

The condition studied, aural atresia, refers to the absence or incomplete formation of an external ear canal. Of the children studied with that condition, about 40 percent needed speech therapy and a quarter have difficulties in school.

Doctor Judith Lieu, an Associate Professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, says one problem is hearing loss in one ear is often ignored because one working ear is thought to be enough for a child to learn and develop properly.

“We don’t want to have the assumption that [children] will do just fine in school and do just fine in terms of speech and language just because one ear hears normally.”

Lieu says this study suggests that adults need to take hearing loss in one ear of a child more seriously.

“We need to be vigilant, and as adults … parents, teachers, physicians … that we can help these children if they appear to be struggling or if they have some of these issues and think about that ear deformity or the hearing loss in the one ear as potentially playing a part in it.”

Lieu says such children might be perceived as “trouble students” as a result of their hearing problems.

“It can be quite noisy in a classroom when kids are busy and talking and chatting and if they are unable to hear well, they may be unable to pick out the teacher’s voice calling them back to attention or calling them back to a task, and so they may just proceed on and be perceived as not paying attention or not listening and having some behavioral issues.”

Lieu says once the problem is identified and recognized there are effective ways to deal with it, but she says more study is needed to determine how aggressively hearing loss in one ear of a child should be treated.

“I don’t want to state that every child needs a hearing aid when I know that hearing aid fitting is not a trivial thing and trying to teach a child to wear it, especially with the current cultural stigmas associated with a hearing device, I don’t want to make it so that every child has to wear it if it doesn’t help them.”

Further complicating matters, Lieu says, is that most private insurance will not cover hearing aids or devices.

“Children are more likely to receive a hearing aid or a device if they have Medicaid because it’s perceived to be a sensory issue so it’s kind of tied to disability, however that’s not universal.”

Lieu hopes to continue some of the additional study that she believes is needed, but says right now funding is difficult to come by because funding agencies don’t consider it a priority and federal research dollars are tight.

The research has been published in JAMA Otolaryngology.

A researcher at Washington University in St. Louis will take part in a study to look for similarities in how humans respond to three potentially lethal viruses.

Washington University Professor of Medicine Michael Diamond, MD, PhD

Washington University Professor of Medicine Michael Diamond is an expert on West Nile virus. He will work with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories who will also study Ebola and influenza.

Diamond says those three ailments were chosen for their differences.

“They cause three different types of very severe disease, so we figured that would give us some insight into some of the pathways which were different. Yet we felt that because they’re all viruses, they replicate in a certain place in the cell, there would be some very conserved pathways which would be trying to restrict them, so there would be elements that would be similar and different.”

Diamond explains that finding similarities between the three could lead to new, more effective treatments useful against all three.

“For example, if you found certain pathways that were commonly activated and trying to restrict these very, very disparate viral infections, then that might be targets for new avenues for new, broad-spectrum antivirals.”

Developing such drugs has been difficult using more conventional methods. Diamond says this will use a “systems biology approach.”

“We look at it from a much higher point of view … we look at how the cells are changed in all of these different ways and then we would identify things that might be in common which could then be targeted.”

Diamond says he will meet his colleagues next month to begin laying out the roadmap for their work over the next five years.

“In the first couple of years we gather an enormous amount of information. We have a computational center that’s going to process this. We generate hypotheses about which of the genes may be important for controlling all three viruses together and which ones may be working specifically, and then the last three years of the grant we begin to test out and confirm and corroborate our hypotheses.”

The study is backed by an $18.3 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health.

One of the purported health benefits of red wine is called into question by a study done in St. Louis.

The findings of a recent Washington University study say a compound in red wine doesn’t deliver in one area of health benefits. (Photo: Robert Boston)

The study was not of red wine but of a compound found in it, resveratrol, that is also sold as a supplement. It is thought to improve insulin sensitivity, reduce risk of heart disease and increase longevity.

Doctor Samuel Klein is the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science and directs the Division of Geriatrics and Nutritional Science and the Center for Applied Research Sciences at the Washington University School of Medicine.  He says studies done on animals have supported some of the claimed benefits of consuming resveratrol, “but those were in metabolically unhealthy animals. We actually studied relatively metabolically healthy people, and when you give resveratrol to metabolically healthy animals there is no beneficial effect. We found a similar result in people … if you’re relatively healthy, there’s no benefit to consuming resveratrol.”

Klein says the finding does not dispute that resveratrol could be beneficial in other situations, such as in people who have metabolic abnormalities. “Those metabolic abnormalities would be blood sugar, increased blood pressure and abnormal blood lipids. So if you have abnormalities in those areas resveratrol might be healthy. We still need more study to really evaluate that more carefully and I think those studies are actually currently underway, and so we’ll get more data in the next one or two years.”

So, Klein says there is no reason for those who take resveratrol supplements to stop based on this finding. “I think if someone is taking resveratrol and they feel it’s helping them, they should continue, but if they’re metabolically healthy to begin with there doesn’t seem to be any obvious benefit at this time.”

As for red wine drinkers, he says, “They should keep drinking as much wine as possible.”

See the study online in Cell Metabolism.