Purpose The aim of the study was to investigate the change in health-related quality of life ( HRQoL) after canal wall up cholesteatoma surgery, using the Glasgow Benefit Inventory (GBI). Methods Data from a consecutive group of 47 adults scheduled for primary cholesteatoma surgery using canal wall up (CWU) with obliteration, from January 2005 to December 2009, were analysed. Information was extracted from a medical database, and complementary data from patient files and audiograms were collected and recorded retrospectively. The GBI questionnaire was used for the assessment of HRQoL after surgery. Results There was no finding of residual or recurrent cholesteatomas in the study group. Hearing was improved at 1 and 3 years postoperatively. No patient suffered a total hearing loss. The overall GBI scores showed an improved HRQoL after surgery. Twenty-nine (85%) patients benefitted from surgery, 1 (3%) had no change, and 4 (12%) expressed deterioration. Conclusions Cholesteatoma surgery using CWU with obliteration gives an improved HRQoL for the majority of patients. The GBI questionnaire provides complementary information to hearing and healing results after cholesteatoma surgery.

Change in linguistic prosody generates a mismatch negativity response (MMN), indicating neural representation of linguistic prosody, while change in affective prosody generates a positive response (P3a), reflecting its motivational salience. However, the neural response to concurrent affective and linguistic prosody is unknown. The present paper investigates the integration of these two prosodic features in the brain by examining the neural response to separate and concurrent processing by electroencephalography (EEG). A spoken pair of Swedish words-[|f amp; x251; MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLONsen] phase and [|f amp; x251;amp; x300;MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLONsen] damn-that differed in emotional semantics due to linguistic prosody was presented to 16 subjects in an angry and neutral affective prosody using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. Acoustically matched pseudowords-[|v amp; x251; MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLONsem] and [|v amp; x251;amp; x300;MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLONsem]-were used as controls. Following the constructionist concept of emotions, accentuating the conceptualization of emotions based on language, it was hypothesized that concurrent affective and linguistic prosody with the same valence-angry [|f amp; x251;amp; x300;MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLONsen] damn-would elicit a unique late EEG signature, reflecting the temporal integration of affective voice with emotional semantics of prosodic origin. In accordance, linguistic prosody elicited an MMN at 300-350 ms, and affective prosody evoked a P3a at 350-400 ms, irrespective of semantics. Beyond these responses, concurrent affective and linguistic prosody evoked a late positive component (LPC) at 820-870 ms in frontal areas, indicating the conceptualization of affective prosody based on linguistic prosody. This study provides evidence that the brain does not only distinguish between these two functions of prosody but also integrates them based on language and experience.