Rapid Triage of Auditory Peripheral and Central Phenotypes Using a Brief but Rich Diagnostic Battery
Abstract
Hearing tests are an important part of assessing a persons health, whether they are service members being treated after noise damage, veterans having difficulties with conversations, or civilians. Hearing problems are associated with communicative, social, and cognitive difficulties. Despite the utility of current hearing tests, they have three connected problems. First, they are too simple and only provide information about significant losses in hearing sensitivity. Second, the testing focus on hearing sensitivity largely ignores any damage or compensation in brain regions that are responsible for making sense of sounds. Third, although current protocols could enable more complex evaluations, those evaluations would take too long to be useful. Our proposal aims to create a rich assessment of hearing, and the brain regions involved in hearing, in as short a time as possible. There can be multiple underlying causes of hearing difficulties in clinical populations, depending on an individual's genetics and history of noise exposure. Animal models, in contrast, offer a way to clearly dissociate and individually control these causes. In this study, we propose to design and refine our rapid hearing assessment battery in animal models where underlying causes can be explicitly confirmed. Damage to the early neural regions of the hearing system will be induced in the animal model by overexposure to repetitive noise resembling gunfire.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1229687
Entities
People
- Aravindakshan Parthasarathy
- Edward Bartlett
Organizations
- Purdue University