Regulation of cochlear blood flow is critical for hearing due to its exquisite sensitivity to ischemia and oxidative stress. Many forms of hearing loss such as sensorineural hearing loss and presbyacusis may involve or be aggravated by blood flow disorders. Animal experiments and clinical outcomes further suggest that there is a gender preference in hearing loss, with males being more susceptib...

BACKGROUND There is very little knowledge about alcohol-induced hearing loss. Alcohol consumption and tolerance to loud noise is a well observed phenomenon as seen in the Western world where parties get noisier by the hour as the evening matures. This leads to increase in the referrals to the "hearing aid clinic" and the diagnosis of "cocktail party deafness" which may not necessarily be only d...

We have shown here several examples of how hearing and vestibular impaired mouse mutants are generated and the insight that they provide in the study of auditory and vestibular function. These types of genetic studies may also lead to the identification of disease-susceptibility genes, perhaps the most critical element in presbyacusis (age-related hearing loss). Some individuals may be more pro...

Age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) is a common human disorder, affecting one in three Americans aged 60 and over. Previous studies have shown that presbyacusis is associated with a loss of non-sensory cells in the cochlear lateral wall. Sox10 is a transcription factor crucial to the development and maintenance of neural crest-derived cells including some non-sensory cell types in the cochle...

n aging research, it is common to compare two groups, young adults and elderly persons. One might ask, for example, whether speech perception in a noisy background is more difficult for elderly persons because of age-related changes in cognition, central processing, memory deficit, depression, or a host of other factors known to be affected by aging. A persistent problem complicating such resea...

and normal word-recognition scores nonetheless complain that speech is difficult to understand, especially when there is background competition. In children this complaint is associated with “auditory processing disorder,” or “APD.” In adults it has been variously termed “obscure auditory dysfunction,” “KingKopetzky Syndrome,” and “APD.” In seniors it is linked to “presbyacusis.” Whatever the n...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate with a new otologic database the results of primary stapes surgery for otosclerosis with up to 14 years of follow-up in a consecutive series of 2,525 patients operated on by the same surgeon with the same technique (stapedotomy and vein graft interposition) and to provide online access to the complete data of this study for the reviewers. To study the effect of specific op...