Age-Related Hearing Loss Is Dominated by Damage to Inner Ear Sensory Cells, Not the Cellular Battery That Powers Them.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Pei-Zhe WuM Charles Liberman

Abstract

Age-related hearing loss arises from irreversible damage in the inner ear, where sound is transduced into electrical signals. Prior human studies suggested that sensory-cell loss is rarely the cause; correspondingly, animal work has implicated the stria vascularis, the cellular "battery" driving the amplification of sound by hair cell "motors." Here, quantitative microscopic analysis of hair cells, auditory nerve fibers, and strial tissues in 120 human inner ears obtained at autopsy, most of whom had recent audiograms in their medical records, shows that the degree of hearing loss is well predicted from the amount of hair cell loss and that inclusion of strial damage does not improve the prediction. Although many aging ears showed significant strial degeneration throughout the cochlea, our statistical models suggest that, by the time strial tissues are lost, hair cell death is so extensive that the loss of battery is no longer important to pure-tone thresholds and that audiogram slope is not diagnostic for strial degeneration. These data comprise the first quantitative survey of hair cell death in normal-aging human cochleas, and reveal unexpectedly severe hair cell loss in low-frequency cochlear regions, and dramatically great...Continue Reading

Citations

Dec 1, 2020·Annals of Internal Medicine·Carrie L Nieman, Esther S Oh
Dec 5, 2020·Trends in Hearing·Raul Sanchez-LopezTorsten Dau
Mar 24, 2021·JAMA : the Journal of the American Medical Association·Daniel Fink
Dec 19, 2020·Pflügers Archiv : European journal of physiology·Barbara Peixoto PinheiroYoussef Adel
Apr 27, 2021·Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience·Richard A AltschulerDavid F Dolan
Jun 9, 2021·Brain Structure & Function·Björn Herrmann, Blake E Butler
Jul 3, 2021·International Journal of Molecular Sciences·Parveen BazardBo Ding
Aug 3, 2021·Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience·Judith S KempfleDavid H Jung
Jul 17, 2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Anahita H MehtaAndrew J Oxenham
Aug 27, 2021·Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience·Tyler T HickmanM Charles Liberman
Aug 31, 2021·Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology·Siyu LiXia Gao
Oct 1, 2021·Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO·Courtney Coburn GlavinSumitrajit Dhar
Oct 8, 2021·Neuroscience Letters·Pei ZhuangHinrich Staecker
Oct 14, 2021·Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO·Kenyaria NobleHainan Lang
Jul 8, 2021·Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO·Zilong XieSamira Anderson

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