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Hearing impaired listeners show different phoneme confusions during speech recognition testing. The aim of the study was to analyze phoneme recognition in patients with sensorineural hearing loss during word recognition testing with monosyllable words, as well as, to compare consonant confusions in different vowel context. Recognition of 18 initial and final consonants was analyzed in a total of 698 presentations of the words. There were 1154 (82.7%) correct recognitions and 100 consonant confusions (7.2%). The patients did not response at a total of 71 presentations of the words which means that consonants in 142 cases (10.2%) were not recognized, nor confused. There are no consonant confusion patterns during suprathreshold testing with real words. In cases of phoneme confusions, listeners replace the stimulus word with another word from the lexical neighborhood. In terms of the vowel context, the consonants are the most easily identified in the context of the vowel /a/. © 2023, Institute for Human Rehabilitation. All rights reserved.

RATIONALE: Perioperative myocardial ischemia is common in high risk patients. The use of interventional revascularisation or even thrombolysis is limited in this patient subset due to exceedingly high bleeding risks. Blockade of voltage gated sodium channels (VGSC) with lidocaine had been suggested to reduce infarct size and cardiomyocyte cell death in ischemia/reperfusion models. However the impact of lidocaine on cardiac function during sustained ischemia still remains unclear. METHODS: Sustained myocardial ischemia was induced by ligation of the left anterior descending artery in 12 16 weeks old male BALB/c mice. Subcutaneous lidocaine (30 mg/kg) was used to block VGSC. Cardiac function was quantified at baseline and at 72h by conventional and speckle tracking based echocardiography to allow high sensitivity in vivo phenotyping. Infarct size and cardiomyocyte cell death were assessed post mortem histologically and indirectly using troponin measurements. RESULTS: Ischemia strongly impaired both global systolic and diastolic function which were partially rescued in lidocaine treated in mice. No differences regarding infarct size and cardiomyocyte cell death were observed. Mechanistically and as shown with speckle tracking analysis lidocaine specifically improves residual contractility in the ischemic but not in the remote non ischemic myocardium. CONCLUSION: VGSC blockade with lidocaine rescues function of ischemic myocardium as a potential bridging to revascularisation in the setting of perioperative myocardial ischemia.