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from the wonder-what-that-would-do-in-the-eyes dept.
Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals that allow us to hear speech, music, and other everyday sounds. Damage to these cells is one of the leading causes of hearing loss, which affects 48 million Americans.
Each of us is born with about 15,000 hair cells per ear, and once damaged, these cells cannot regrow. However, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear have now discovered a combination of drugs that expands the population of progenitor cells (also called supporting cells) in the ear and induces them to become hair cells, offering a potential new way to treat hearing loss.
"Hearing loss is a real problem as people get older. It's very much of an unmet need, and this is an entirely new approach," says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.
[...] Because this treatment involves a simple drug exposure, the researchers believe it could be easy to administer it to human patients. They envision that the drugs could be injected into the middle ear, from which they would diffuse across a membrane into the inner ear. This type of injection is commonly performed to treat ear infections.
Will J. McLean et al. Clonal Expansion of Lgr5-Positive Cells from Mammalian Cochlea and High-Purity Generation of Sensory Hair Cells. Cell Reports, February 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.01.066
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(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:08PM
I can hear music just fine.
If I'm in a noisy place and someone to my left tries to talk to me, I'll turn my head around so they face my right ear, then ask them to repeat themselves.
Starting at six years old then continuing for several years, I had once per month hearing tests. I was told this was to determine whether my hearing was getting worse. I didn't see the point of the tests as there was nothing they could do about worsening deafness.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:46PM
That sounds like speech discrimination more than hearing loss. That's the term my doctor used.
I sometimes have difficulty understanding speech in a loud noisy environment. But I can tell if a CRT television (remember those?) is turned on in the other room just by the ultrasonic sound from the yoke. (actually just very high pitched) Spouse didn't believe it. So we did several tests. Go in the other room, turn ancient tv on or off. Come back and I can tell you which.
I can hear other very quiet sounds. But sometimes have difficulty with speech if multiple people are talking at once, or there is too much noise.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by richtopia on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:33PM
Wait- I thought that was normal. You mean people can actually understand each other at bars or airports or meetings? It would explain a lot of social iterations I'm puzzled by.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:57AM
Weird trick for noisy environments like that. You see people plug the ear facing away from the person they're trying to listen to. Doesn't help much. Instead, try plugging the ear *towards* the person you're trying to listen to and you'll find them much easier to hear. I dramatically increases the signal to noise ratio.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:09PM
Thanks! I always take my gaming headset on business trips with the hope of noise isolating conference calls I have to take in airports, but I'll try that the next time I have an issue.