Hair cells of the inner ear exhibit an active process, believed to be crucial for achieving the sensitivity of auditory and vestibular detection. One of the manifestations of the active process is the occurrence of spontaneous hair bundle oscillations in vitro. Hair bundles are coupled by overlying membranes in vivo; hence, explaining the potential role of innate bundle motility in the generati...

Hair cell fate determination in the inner ear has been shown to be controlled by specific genes. Recent loss-of-function and gain-of-function experiments have demonstrated that Math1, a mouse homolog of the Drosophila gene atonal, is essential for the production of hair cells. To identify genes that may interact with Math1 and inhibit hair cell differentiation, we have focused on Hes1, a mammal...

Autoimmune inner ear disease is described as progressive, bilateral although asymmetric, sensorineural hearing loss and can be improved by immunosuppressive therapy. We showed that the inner ear autoantigen β-tubulin is capable of inducing experimental autoimmune hearing loss (EAHL) in mice. Immunization of BALB/c mice with β-tubulin resulted in hair cell loss and hearing loss, effects that wer...

The audiological or physiological data showed that auditory neuropathy was due to the demylination disease in peripheral nerve, especially in auditory nerve. The aim of this study was to explore the changes of auditory function and auditory nerve pathology through establishing a guinea pig model with demyelinated peripheral nerve. The guinea pig model was established by immunizing guinea pigs w...

A critical step in encoding sound for neuronal processing occurs when the analog pressure wave is coded into discrete nerve-action potentials. Recent pool models of the inner hair cell synapse do not reproduce the dead time period after an intense stimulus, so we used visual inspection and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to investigate an offset adaptation (OA) model proposed by Zhang et al....

Sensorineural hearing loss is a caused by the loss of the cochlear hair cells with the consequent deafferentation of spiral ganglion neurons. Humans do not show endogenous cellular regeneration in the inner ear and there is no exogenous therapy that allows the replacement of the damaged hair cells. Currently, treatment is based on the use of hearing aids and cochlear implants that present diffe...

................................................................................................................................7 Abbreviations........................................................................................................................8 1 Review of the literature .............................................................................................. 10 1.1 Fun...

Synapses between cochlear nerve terminals and hair cells are the most vulnerable elements in the inner ear in both noise-induced and age-related hearing loss, and this neuropathy is exacerbated in the absence of efferent feedback from the olivocochlear bundle. If age-related loss is dominated by a lifetime of exposure to environmental sounds, reduction of acoustic drive to the inner ear might i...