Audiological findings following head trauma.

Traumatic head injury is the principal cause of death and serious physical disability in adolescents and young adult. Hearing loss is a common sequela of head trauma. The results of pure tone and auditory brain-stem response (ABR) assessment of minor head injury revealed that 20 per cent of these cases showed impairment of hearing including both conductive and sensorineural hearing loss mostly in the high frequencies loss. ABR findings showed a significant difference of absolute wave V latency and interwave (III-V) latencies at repetition rate 11.1 click/sec., and a highly significant difference at a repetition rate of 51.1 click/sec., compared with the control group. In severe head injury, conductive hearing loss was found in only one case, in which a longitudinal fracture of the temporal bone was identified radiologically. No ABR could be recorded at a repetition rate of 11.1 click/sec. in either ear of this case; this patient died a few days later. Three cases were found with a mixed sensorineural hearing loss; one of them showed a longitudinal fracture radiologically. ABR findings in two cases showed prolongation of wave V and I-V interwave latencies, and the third case showed absence of ABR recording. In comatose patients, an ABR grading system is a more sensitive index of brainstem dysfunction than the simple division of normal versus abnormal ABR waves and interwave latencies. Presence or prolongation of wave V and interwave latency I-V even in one ear is of good prognostic value in the comatosed patient.

Nasal mucociliary function in different diseases of the nose.

Two techniques, using saccharin sky-blue powder and barium sulfate particles, were used to study the nasal mucociliary clearance in 40 normal subjects and 200 patients with different nasal diseases. The transport time was measured in each test subject and a highly significant difference was observed between healthy persons and the study group (p less than 0.001). The saccharin sky-blue test serves as a valuable screening test.

Comparative studies on some leguminous protein sources and soybean proteins.

The nutrient contents as well as the amino acid pattern of broad bean, kidney bean and soybean were determined. The levels of most of the amino acids were also estimated. Heat treatment of the leguminous seeds caused a noticeable reduction in the levels of methionine, cystine, lysine and tryptophan. Animal experiments showed high figures for digestibility, biological value and net protein utilization for the soybean diet whereas the broad bean and kidney beans gave lower values of these measurement compared with soybean.