New packaging from February 2012 onwards

Better suited, it has everything going for it!

COTRAL Laboratory have designed new packaging for their Optimum and Excellium packs. Better suited, more practical, readily identifiable and recyclable, it has many arguments in its favour!

The ears grow with age

Our ears continue to develop throughout our entire life

Human beings' hearing abilities deteriorate with age. Nevertheless, the ears continue to develop. According to an article published in the Danish daily newspaper, Politiken, this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the external ear functions as a funnel. In order to compensate for the deterioration in hearing abilities due to aging, this funnel grows, thereby picking up sounds more effectively.

This phenomenon, which is also known by the term "age-dependent ear growth", was the subject of an in-depth study reported in the Danish medical journal Ugeskrift For Læger.

This article is based on a number of rather unusual studies. Hence, one of these studies focused on the ears of members of the royal family and the aristocracy and another on the ears of 100 future or former female nurses. The conclusion is identical both for men and women: the ears grow with age".

Sources: the Danish medical journal "Ugeskrift for Læger", the Danish magazine "Hørelsen" and the Danish daily newspaper "Politiken".

Source: Youth Hear-It

The ears grow by 0.22 mm a year

One day in 1993, the honourable members of the Royal College of General Practitioners (Bore Place, Kent) wondered how to encourage general practitioners to conduct interesting research. Whereas some of them were in favour of encouraging structured works, others in contrast preferred to give full rein to "serendipity" (the gift of making fortunate discoveries by chance). They finally agreed on the idea of finding the answer to a question of great concern: do one's ears increase in size as one ages?

Four general practitioners, filled with enthusiasm by the project, undertook to measure the ears of all their patients of more than 30 years of age, over the entire length of the external auricle, from top to bottom, using a transparent ruler and noted down the result in millimetres.

The patients showed themselves keenly interested in the project. A statistical method was used to calculate the relationship between the patient's age and the size of the ears.

All in all, 206 patients were studied (average age: 53 years, with extremes of between 30 and 93 years). The mean length of the ears was 675 mm (between 520 and 840 mm).

A linear regression equation was derived from the data collected; it is: size of ears = 55.9 + (0.72 x patient's age).

It indeed became apparent that older one gets, the larger the ears become. They grow on average by 0.22 mm a year.

No reference was found in the literature concerning this question.[...]"

By Dr. Béatrice VUAILLE, "British Medical Journal" of 23rd December 1995