BACKGROUND Some loop ear surgical procedures include cartilage section or abrasion, while others involve antihelix folding by simple suture. METHODS Our results with the Mustardé technique are presented. This procedure avoids an aggressive action on the ear cartilage and makes antihelix folding easier. RESULTS Good aesthetic results were obtained in all our patients, with a low complication...

The Medicare Advantage (MA) program continues to grow and thrive, despite plan payment cuts imposed through the Affordable Care Act. What explains this surprising outcome (one that is strikingly different than the experience of MA plans in the late 1990s, when payment cuts led to dramatic shrinkage in enrollment and curtailment of plans)? This analysis argues that a combination of factors, incl...

Sustainable competitive advantage (CA) is a necessary requirement of a rational economic business organisation. Without this CA a business does not have a rational source for appropriating added value in the form of retained profit. Various management research papers have identified numerous factors that may create a source of competitive advantage. Other researchers have shown how industries h...

Normative data from 24 right-handed and 24 left-handed subjects were obtained for the dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) materials (pa, ta, ka, ba, da, and ga) recorded on the Veterans Affairs (VA) compact disc (CD) Tonal and Speech Materials for Auditory Perceptual Assessment, Disc 1.0. Identification performance by the two subject groups was significantly different. With the right-handed subjects,...

Bipolar disorder (BD) has been associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. These findings usually come from studies that have not distinguished between symptomatic and euthymic states of BD. The present study aims to investigate atypical right (and left) hemispheric functioning in euthymic BD patients. We evaluated 40 participants (18 healthy controls and 22 euthymic BD patients) using an emo...

Previous research shows that children with Rolandic Epilepsy have deficits of auditory processing. We wanted to confirm the nature of this deficit and whether it aggregates in families. We compared 40 children with Rolandic Epilepsy and 32 unaffected siblings with 99 typically developing children and 71 parents of RE children with 31 healthy adults on a battery of auditory processing tests. We ...

Application of nitrogen fertilizer in the past 50 years has resulted in significant increases in crop yields. However, loss of nitrogen from crop fields has been associated with negative impacts on the environment. Developing maize hybrids with improved nitrogen use efficiency is a cost-effective strategy for increasing yield sustainably. We report that a dominant male-sterile mutant Ms44 encod...

The Affordable Care Act enacts a new payment system for private health plans available to Medicare beneficiaries through the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. The system, which is being phased in through 2017, aims to (1) reduce the excess pay­ments received by private plans relative to per capita spending in traditional Medicare, and (2) reward plans that earn high performance ratings. Using 20...

1 Doctor in Science, FMUSP, faculty member of the speech therapy course, Guarulhos University. 2 'Livre-docente' habilitation, faculty member of the speech therapy course, FMUSP. Temporal resolution hearing skills are based on the minimum time necessary to segregate or solve acoustic events. This skill is fundamental for speech comprehension and can be assessed by gap detection tests. Some stud...

This study aimed to investigate differences between ears in performance on a monaural word recognition in noise test among individuals across a broad range of ages assessed for (C)APD. Word recognition scores in quiet and in speech noise were collected retrospectively from the medical files of 107 individuals between the ages of 7 and 30 years who were diagnosed with (C)APD. No ear advantage wa...