Journal
JARO-JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH IN OTOLARYNGOLOGY
Volume 12, Issue 5, Pages 605-616Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10162-011-0277-0
Keywords
acoustic injury; excitotoxicity; inner ear
Categories
Funding
- National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders [R01 DC0188, R01 DC8577, T32 DC0038, P30 DC5029]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recent work in mouse showed that acoustic overexposure can produce a rapid and irreversible loss of cochlear nerve peripheral terminals on inner hair cells (IHCs) and a slow degeneration of spiral ganglion cells, despite full recovery of cochlear thresholds and no loss of inner or outer hair cells (Kujawa and Liberman, J Neurosci 29:14077-14085, 2009). This contrasts with earlier ultrastructural work in guinea pig suggesting that acute noise-induced neural degeneration is followed by full regeneration of cochlear nerve terminals in the IHC area (Puel et al., Neuroreport 9:2109-2114, 1998; Pujol and Puel, Ann N Y Acad Sci 884:249-254, 1999). Here, we show that the same patterns of primary neural degeneration reported for mouse are also seen in the noise-exposed guinea pig, when IHC synapses and cochlear nerve terminals are counted 1 week post-exposure in confocal images from immunostained whole mounts and that the same slow degeneration of spiral ganglion cells occurs despite no loss of IHCs and apparent recovery of cochlear thresholds. The data cast doubt on prior claims that there is significant neural regeneration and synaptogenesis in the adult cochlea and suggest that denervation of the inner hair cell is an important sequela of reversible noise-induced hearing loss, which likely applies to the human ear as well.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available