A Comparative Approach to Human Auditory Synaptopathy
Abstract
Rationale, Objectives and Aims of the Application, and Who will it help? Noise exposure presents a well-known risk to communication abilities and quality of life as individuals age. It is known that with aging comes the greater likelihood that hearing will be more difficult and might require the use of a hearing aid, which may or may not treat the problem. This is likely to be a greater problem because our population is getting older and noisier. But noise and age do not only damage the hearing mechanisms in the inner ear itself, as has previously been thought, but has been shown in many recent studies of animal hearing to also result in damage to the connections between the sensory structures in the ear and the nerves that carry the information to the brain for interpretation of speech and other important sounds of life. With these new studies, people with hearing impairment may be faced much more often with the loss of speech recognition due to neural damage that may not be treated well by a hearing aid. At present, there is no method of diagnosing this additional cause of hearing loss due primarily to noise exposure in humans. Identification of a more neurally based hearing barrier is crucial to support new therapies such as pharmaceutical treatments that have the potential to repair such damage. Without a way to predict that some of the results of hearing tests may be related to this neural connectivity damage, the benefit of such newly emerging treatments cannot be tracked and monitored. This project is designed to develop a statistical model based on similarity of hearing behavior of humans and animals with known neural damage that can effectively estimate the damage to neural structures in human patients. Potential Benefits and Risks: The value of this model to predict the presence of neural damage underlying a loss of clear hearing in a patient would be in assisting clinicians and clinical scientists in providing appropriate treatment, and to be able to monitor whether treatments are working through a new diagnostic non-invasive test battery that would be analyzed using this statistical model. There are no significant risks in carrying out the behavioral and physiological hearing tests that could be included in such a model, and the benefits would be to monitor the effects of certain treatments and help to develop new therapies. Additionally, such a model could be used to help monitor the risks that might result from pharmaceutical treatments that might be developed. How long will it be before patients would see benefit from this project? This initial research project is three years in duration. At the end of that time, the predictive model should be developed and validated. It will undoubtedly be improved over the coming years, but it should be available in clinics (or at least in research laboratories) very soon after the project is completed. All the testing that is designed to provide input to direct the modeling toward a specific patient is well-established in the research labs and in many audiology clinics, so application to patients would be available as soon as the modeling work is completed. However, it must be cautioned that treatments and therapies for this form of neurally based hearing loss are currently under intense research efforts, so until those are perfected, this modelling effort would not be as impactful as it will be once the treatments are available. Contributions to advancing the field of hearing restoration research: This project will contribute significantly to the study of methods of hearing restoration because it will be able to produce probabilities and likelihoods that this particular mechanism of hearing loss as a response to noise exposure (as well as possible other sources) is present in an individual patient or research subject. Should this model be successful, further refinements may be able to more accurately target locations in the ear (in terms of impaired frequency re
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 19, 2019
- Source ID
- W81XWH1910862
Entities
People
- Marjorie Leek
Organizations
- Jerry L. Pettis Memorial VA Medical Center
- United States Army