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Twenty-one cases of esophageal foreign bodies in children were treated at the authors' clinic during the last 9 years (1970-1978). In the present paper, 4 cases out of the 21 who presented troublesome clinical courses were reported.Case 1: A 16-month-old girl misswallowed a piece of washer. The initial symptoms of vomiting and odynophagia disappeared gradually, while dysphagia continued. The foreign body was removed endoscopically 20 days later.Case 2: A 10-month-old boy suffered from a hypopharyngeal foreign body (pin). The main symptom was stridor and, for this reason, the definite diagnosis was delayed. It was found that the pin penetrated through the hypopharyngeal wall to the laryngeal cavity.Case 3: A 3-year and 8-month-old boy, who underwent a surgery for congenital atresia of the esophagus at age 1, misswallowed an iron ball. The foreign body stuck at the stricture of the site of anastmosis.Case 4: A 5-year and 11-month-old boy misswallowed his dental prosthesis. This was a rare foreign body in childhood.The incidence of such foreign bodies in children as observed in Cases 3 and 4 may increase in future. In order to prevent foreign bodies of these types, a good knowledge of the parents and child himself seems mandatory.

During 7 years since 1971, 97 preschool children of unilateral sensorineural hearing loss with normal hearing contralaterally were either screened out by the hearing screening tests for nursery-school children, or found by the consultations at the Children's Medical and Welfare Center.Seventy-nine children attended for interviews and further examinations.Among 6, 825, preschool children, 10 cases of unilateral sensorineural hearing loss were screened out. Neither sexual nor affected-ear difference was observed.In 57 percent out of 79 patients, the disorder was discovered by their parents before their school age. Etiology was unknown in 89 percent, though about half of them had any suspicious factor in their history. Mumpus was the cause in 8 percent. In other 2 cases (3 percent), the rapid onset of hearing impairment appeared after high fever and earache. Eighty-one percent of them showed severe hearing loss. In 21 percent of the children, the hearing loss was progressed. Caloric test showed canal paresis of the affected ears in 24 percent of the patients. One third of them were in the progressive hearing loss group. No abnormality was discovered by X-ray tomography in the canal paresis group.

The brain stem responses were studied in 13 patients with confirmed various lesions of the brain stem. Abnormalities in response appeared with shorter interstimulus intervals with clicks delivered monoaurally to the involved side in the patients with brain stem vascular lesion. One out of 4 cases of pinealoma showed abnormally greater variability of the response on the affected side. Auditory brain stem responses recorded from the patients with other brain stem lesions showed prolongation in latency and/or reduction in amplitude of the components originating in the site central to the lesion.Reviewing reports of animal experiments, the authors discussed the difference of site of origin of the 4th component which appeared prominently in those cases with the lesions at the middle, upper pons or the midbrain in human.

As auditory system has no sensory epithelium into which auditory space are projected, we studied the physiological map of the auditory space in the non-primary auditory cortex of the mustached bat by using the echo of their orientation sound. Ten bats were used as experimental subjects. Tungsten wire electrodes were inserted obliquely in the dorsomedial (DM) and ventroposterior (VP) areas of the non-primary auditory cortex. When single neuron was isolated, best frequency (BF), best azymuth (BAZ) and best elevation (BEL) were measured and were plotted on a schematic figure. To mimic its biosonar, one loudspeaker, delivering synthesized orientation sounds, was placed in front of the animal, and another loudspeaker delivering synthesized echo was mounted on a movable hoop. Tonotopic representation was observed but complicated in both areas, and those areas could be divided into several subdivisions consisting of the neuron groups characterized by three frequency bands. The neurons were thought to be related to the processing of biosonar informations from the facts that their BFs agreed with the scope of the FM sweep of each echo harmonics. The magnitude of the response showed rapid increase at their BAZ or BEL, so that the neurons seemed to tune to a certain direction in the auditory space. Especially in the DM area, neurons assumed a systematic arrangement of their BAZs on the cerebral surface and showed some tendency of a systematic arrangement of their BELs. The DM area was thought to have a kind of neural map of the auditory space.