EDITORIAL

Dear readers,

Since this issue is focused on the topic of HEARING, I invited an expert and my colleague from the editorial board, Dr. Radka Horáková, to help me with this text. It is good to admit that we all have our limits: because there are not many patients with hearing disorders in general outpatient clinics, I admit I lack expertise on this particular subject. Putting together this issue was therefore extremely instructive and interesting for me personally.

This issue is very wide-ranging, bringing articles on the diagnosis and etiology of hearing defects, cochlear implants, monitoring, hearing rehabilitation, but also offers a view from the other side, i. e. from the hearing impaired themselves.

Yet, having compiled it, we realized that we had left out more than one topic. First of all, we ought to mention the community of the Deaf who communicate in Czech sign language; a language that is the mother tongue not only for them but also for their children. The texts of this issue were created through lively exchange of information via various communication channels amongst all participants, so our communication aims were successfully fulfilled. However, many people with hearing impairments are unable to achieve this goal themselves. They face many communication barriers every day and often have to make considerable efforts to simply understand, when dealing with a speaker who is not very ‘readable’; who speaks too fast, does not maintain eye contact, or does not keep to the rules when communicating in the presence of a sign language interpreter, etc.

We already have several suggestions for further articles on this topic and we want to include them in one of the forthcoming issues. The second group that we did not pay enough attention to in this issue are the elderly and the phenomenon of age-related hearing loss (or presbyacusis) as a ‘lifestyle’ disease. We also want to go back to these topics in the next issues of our journal.

We thank the editors, the authors, the reviewers and the editorial board for their fine cooperation. Thanks go to all the colleagues who specialize in hearing disorders and can duly direct our work. We wish you all a worthwhile read. Our entire editorial team look forward to seeing you on the pages of the next issue, which we want to focus on speech fluency disorders. We will be very happy to receive your contributory texts once again. Until then, it remains only to wish everyone a peaceful respite from this very peculiar year and lots of hope for next year.

On behalf of the LKL editorial board

Zuzana Lebedová and Radka Horáková