Researching the connection between hearing and balance
Audiology assistant professor Robin Criter is examining the connections between balance and hearing, specifically researching whether hearing loss is an indicator for loss of balance.
It is a question that steered her toward audiology earlier in her education, and once that she has pursued through her own doctoral dissertation.
"My goal was to see if I could develop a protocol that would determine, within one minute, if a hearing patient was at risk for falls," she said. But doing so involves interprofessional knowledge that goes beyond the inner ear. It also requires some knowledge about eyes and the ways the brain processes somatosensory stimuli.
In 2015, Dr. Criter was granted a Support for Faculty Scholars award from the Office of the Vice President of Research. The one-year award of $2000 funded a study of the screening protocol Criter developed as part of her dissertation. The study was to evaluate the protocol and determine if there is a relationship between fall risk and hearing ability based on these measures.
Hannah Hodges, a doctoral student currently studying with Dr. Criter, is also focused on balance, researching how it is impacted by caffeine. She was recently awarded a Graduate Student Research Grant ($1000) through the WMU Graduate College to support this work.
"I want our students to graduate with an appreciation for the balance side of audiology," said Criter. "So that even if they are working in a setting where the focus is on hearing and fitting hearing aids, they are thinking about how this may affect the patient’s balance, the patient’s fall history, and ultimately the whole patient experience and quality of life."
Criter was recently accepted in the ASHA Pathways Program for research mentoring, where she will be paired with a well-established investigator with similar interests. ASHA is funding a trip out to the national headquarters in the D.C. area for a two-day workshop and the mentoring partnership will continue through the year after that. She plans to use this experience to refine a research proposal further investigating how well older adults can hear and whether or not they lose their balance, adding to the evidence that hearing is not solely about communication and that hearing has implications for our social, emotional, and physical well-being.
Dr. Criter has been invited to chair a feature session on the topic of “Hearing, Balance, and Falls” at the World Congress of Audiology XXXIII meeting in Vancouver this September.