Photo credit: Alexas Fotos
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
According to the NAU Review, published by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the answer to hearing loss may lie in mouse DNA. The Review reports that the director of NAU’s Cell and Molecular Pathology Lab, O’neil Guthrie, found that DNA in a certain mouse has repair signals that stop cell death leading to hearing loss. The U.S. Department of Defense has already funded $600,000 of additional research.
I added an homage to John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella and a question mark to the title of this blog post for two reasons. First, while mice and men share something like 85%-97.5% of DNA, depending on how researchers calculate similarities, mice are not humans nor are humans mice. When it comes to research on noise-induced hearing loss, there may be crucial differences. As Wu et al. from Harvard’s Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary wrote in a 2020 article: “Our data also show that hair cell degeneration in aging humans is worse than that in aging animals, suggesting that the high-frequency hearing losses that define human presbycusis reflect avoidable contributions of chronic ear abuse to which aging animals are not exposed.”
Second, I think the answer to preventing hearing loss is much simpler: Avoid noise exposure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that noise-induced hearing loss is the only type of hearing loss that is entirely preventable. Note that the CDC actually has the word “prevention” in its formal name. Prevention of disease is always better and almost always cheaper than treatment. This is certainly true for noise-induced hearing loss. The only treatment for almost all forms of hearing loss is amplification, such as hearing aids, with cochlear implantation reserved for the profoundly hearing impaired. Neither hearing aids nor cochlear implants restore normal hearing. Earplugs, though, are inexpensive and easy to use.
No more research is needed, in mice or humans, to know exactly how to prevent noise-induced hearing loss. Avoid loud noise exposure, turn down the volume, leave the noisy environment or insert earplugs and one’s ears should last a lifetime.
