Health - Hearing latest news

Preliminary research culled from a national medical insurance records database in Taiwan suggests that sudden loss of hearing might be an early sign of vulnerability to stroke, foreshadowing an actual cerebrovascular event by as much as 2 years. The study that led to these results is reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. Five-year follow-up data on 1,423 patients hospitalised for an acute episode of sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) showed that those patients were 1.5 times more likely to suffer a stroke than a control group of 5,692 patients who had been hospitalised for an appendectomy.

The other day I was leisurely reading CNN.com's latest America's Money series, on gas prices. One of them featured a deaf couple, the Metsches from Vancouver, Washington. They talk about...