Impact of aging on the auditory system and related cognitive functions: A narrative review

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL), presbycusis, is a chronic health condition that affects approximately one-third of the world’s population. The peripheral and central hearing alterations associated with age-related hearing loss have a profound impact on perception of verbal and non-verbal auditory stimuli. The high prevalence of hearing loss in the older adults corresponds to the increased frequency of dementia in this population. Therefore, researchers have focused their attention on age-related central effects that occur independent of the peripheral hearing loss as well as central effects of peripheral hearing loss and its association with cognitive decline and dementia. Here we review the current evidence for the age-related changes of the peripheral and central auditory system and the relationship between hearing loss and pathological cognitive decline and dementia. Furthermore, there is a paucity of evidence on the relationship between ARHL and established biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, as the most common cause of dementia. Such studies are critical to be able to consider any causal relationship between dementia and ARHL. While this narrative review will examine the pathophysiological alterations in both the peripheral and central auditory system and its clinical implications, the question remains unanswered whether hearing loss causes cognitive impairment or vice versa

Valuing assessment in teacher education - Multiple-choice competency testing

When our focus is on assessment educators should work to value the nature of assessment. This paper presents a new approach to multiple-choice competency testing in mathematics education. The instrument discussed here reflects student competence, encourages self-regulatory learning behaviours and links content with current curriculum documents and with collaborative and cooperative learning episodes

Biomarker-Guided Non-Adaptive Trial Designs in Phase II and Phase III: A Methodological Review (vol 7, 1, 2017)

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Fixed and Adaptive Parallel Subgroup-Specific Design for Survival Outcomes: Power and Sample Size (vol 7, 19, 2017)

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Fixed and Adaptive Parallel Subgroup-Specific Design for Survival Outcomes: Power and Sample Size

Biomarker-guided clinical trial designs, which focus on testing the effectiveness of a biomarker-guided approach to treatment in improving patient health, have drawn considerable attention in the era of stratified medicine with many different designs being proposed in the literature. However, planning such trials to ensure they have sufficient power to test the relevant hypotheses can be challenging and the literature often lacks guidance in this regard. In this study, we focus on the parallel subgroup-specific design, which allows the evaluation of separate treatment effects in the biomarker-positive subgroup and biomarker-negative subgroup simultaneously. We also explore an adaptive version of the design, where an interim analysis is undertaken based on a fixed percentage of target events, with the option to stop each biomarker-defined subgroup early for futility or efficacy. We calculate the number of events and patients required to ensure sufficient power in each of the biomarker-defined subgroups under different scenarios when the primary outcome is time-to-event. For the adaptive version, stopping probabilities are also explored. Since multiple hypotheses are being tested simultaneously, and multiple interim analyses are undertaken, we also focus on controlling the overall type I error rate by way of multiplicity adjustment