A special Topic on Brain, hearting and Tinnitus science has now been published on the MDPI website: https://www.mdpi.com/topics/Brain_Hearing_and_Tinnitus_Science

With this multidisciplinary Topic, UNITI consortium wants to generate an open access forum for clinical and translational tinnitus research, including preclinical studies, innovative diagnostic procedures, and novel treatment strategies that aim to improve the patient journey from diagnosis to the best-suited therapeutic approach for the individual patient. In this respect, research papers on individualized treatment decisions and decision support systems are also strongly encouraged. Original research papers and systematic reviews of high quality are welcome.

We are happy to announce that we have a new paper published in Frontiers in Neuroscience: "The Impact of COVID-19 Confinement on Tinnitus and Hearing Loss in Older Adults: Data From the LOST in Lombardia Study". 

Although a direct relationship between tinnitus or hearing difficulties and COVID-19 has been suggested, current literature provides inconsistent results, and no research has been undertaken in older adults. In a large representative sample of older adults, on average neither COVID-19 confinement nor SARS-CoV-2 infection appeared to increase the severity or incidence of tinnitus. The increased severity of hearing difficulties may totally or partially be explained by physiologic deterioration of the condition, or by a misperception due to the use of face-masks.

More about this publication here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2022.838291/full. 

UNITI features at the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS). This is the European Commission's primary source of results from the projects funded by the EU's framework programmes for research and innovation (FP1 to Horizon 2020).

Our recent study supported by the EU-funded ESIT, UNITI and GENDER NET Plus projects is presented. Published in the journal ‘The Lancet Regional Health – Europe’, the study reports a single pan-European estimate for the prevalence of tinnitus.

We are happy to announce that we have a new paper published in the MDPI Journal Entropy (Special Issue Challenges of Health Data Analytics). The publication is relevant from an mHealth prespective and its title is: "Interactive System for Similarity-Based Inspection and Assessment of the Well-Being of mHealth Users".

Presentation of Tinnitus in mHealth is not clearly understood, and there is a need for a physician to be able to explore the EMA data as well as patient info collected through one-time questionnaires. This paper proposes a way to visualise both data using extensions to a "node link diagram", and interactively identify 'outlier users' whose EMAs look very different form the typical case using short and long term forecasts. More about this publication that is also available as open access can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/1410756.

We are happy to announce that we have a new paper published: "Discovery of Patient Phenotypes through Multi-layer Network Analysis on the Example of Tinnitus" and is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9564158.

Electronic health records (EHR) often include multiple perspectives on a patient's current state of well-being (e.g. vital signs and subjective indicators measured by questionnaires). In this study, the authors use these perspectives to build phenotypes of chronic tinnitus patients and investigate how these phenotypes are associated with response to treatment.