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Drug Treatment Could Combat Hearing Loss

posted by on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the wonder-what-that-would-do-in-the-eyes dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:28AM (#470625)
    The same thing happened to me. Got an ear infection and turned out to be a viral infection. Have no idea how or where I picked it up. Long story short, mine was termed Sudden Sensory Hearing Loss and they fed me corticosteroids for it to try and save my hearing. It went from completely deaf to now having my hearing back. The Tinnitus you mention went from a thunderous roar like a jet engine (once some hearing returned) to now a high pitched frequency noise but I can hear quite well. It took an entire year to get to this stage. A year from hell to be honest. It pushed one to the brink of sanity. You can't shut it off. You can't escape it. You're incredibly sensitive to sound and almost have bionic hearing and an ear full of pressure that makes your head feel like it's going to pop. My sincere advice to you is to buy a headband with bluetooth speakers built in and connect it to your cellphone. You will want to buy an app called WHITE NOISE from Google Play (also available on BlackBerry which is what I have used). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tmsoft.whitenoise.full&hl=en [google.com] costs $1.29...and it will save your sanity. You will want to download sounds that you can use to mask the Tinnitus. The sound will be like a fan or the sound of an airline cabin (sans distracting noise). You will adjust the sound level of your headband earphones to a low enough level to mask the Tinnitus. It works. Trust me! I know. It was the only thing that I could do to get sleep. Go to eBay and look up sleep earphones http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Anti-noise-Sports-Running-Sleeping-Earphones-Music-Headband-Sleep-Headphones-New-/331780265139?var=&hash=item4d3fa514b3:m:mY-DDEC_G4zYD76w5Kfecyg [www.ebay.ca] they cost like $4-8. So for under $10 I can guarantee you some peace of mind. DO IT!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:48AM (#470632)
    I forgot to mention that once you buy the White Noise App, all the sounds are free to download. You have a maximum you can download of 5 per day unless you use a Facebook login (unlimited then). You can really customize the app to still wake you up by alarm in the morning but it's a good idea to have two set just in case (one on your phone you're using the app and earphones with) and another real clock radio style alarm. The link I gave you in my previous post was for the wired kind of earphones. Here are is a listing for Bluetooth ones http://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1311.R2.TR4.TRC0.A0.H0.Xbluetooth+sleep.TRS0&_nkw=bluetooth+sleep+headphones&_sacat=0 [www.ebay.ca] With the White Noise app, there are a LOT of sounds that are suitable to use. I have like 50 I like but I gravitate towards the sound of the fridge, quiet room, fans, heaters, ventilation, airline cabin sounds...etc. You will spend a lot of time finding the sounds that work best for you. But when you do, you'll be in heaven. You may also want to look into a disease called Meniere's Disease. My doctor told me he things that's what I have. I'm one of the lucky 1/5000 people that get it. Here is an article on it recently posted by the CBC in Canada. http://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1311.R2.TR4.TRC0.A0.H0.Xbluetooth+sleep.TRS0&_nkw=bluetooth+sleep+headphones&_sacat=0 [www.ebay.ca] For the record, I can still play my guitar and enjoy music. But my Tinnitus is cyclical now and flares up at times out of the blue. It will never fully go away and I can always go deaf in that ear one day. For now my doctor thinks I am very lucky. I think I am also all things considered. Good luck!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:58AM (#470634)
      I've fucking massacred these posts. I'm sorry for the mess but I'm doing it from a tablet and it's a pain in the ass to get it right and perfect. It also strips out all the damn paragraphs.... Here is the CBC link article http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/hearing-loss-sudden-1.3953118 [www.cbc.ca]