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Drug Allows Deafened Mice to Regrow Inner Ear Hair
sciencehabit writes "All you graying, half-deaf Def Leppard fans, listen up. A drug applied to the ears of mice deafened by noise can restore some hearing in the animals. By blocking a key protein, the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow. The treatment isn't anywhere near ready for use in humans, but the advance at least raises the prospect of restoring hearing to some deafened people."
But I have hair in my ears. I need it under my hat!
--
BMO
I never head of this.
maybe they can cure tinnitus .
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Didn't get any of this due to my Tinnitus.
What, hey?
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
... than the hearing of younger music fans listening to todays music. It's well established recording levels on newer, digitally mixed music is higher and features fewer audio low points than music from the early 90's and prior.
Also consider ear buds are the new norm for most music players, delivering sound directly to the ear canal. Your parents had walkmen with crappy foam headphones that didn't stay centered over the ear all that well.
"the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow."
So those of us half deaf from other causes are still out of luck? Way to lead me on, Slashdot.
There is no hair in the inner ear. Even the submitter didn't RTFA, apparently...
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Deaf people re-growing inner ear parts...
Blind people re-growing eyes and optic nerves...
Alcoholics re-growing a liver...
Soldiers re-growing limbs....
It's all possible, given time to develop these things... EXCEPT...
I just can't grow a set of balls and stand up to my wife!
Drug double dosis by accident and get superauditive powers, then become the paladin of the neighbour gossips.
I'm not sure that follows. Listeners compensate for both of these things by cranking up the volume only to be way over tolerance when the song goes from low point to high point or when the foam headphones shift back into place.
Which is worse for ears? Semi-loud music for 10 minutes or 10 seconds of over-the-top loud? It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect the opposite effect with flatter dynamics and a more physically stable listening device.
Could this be used to reverse or at least slow down age-related hearing loss? People are living so much longer than they used to, so we need every medical trick we can devise to lessen the detriments of age.
The tech guys had a big meter with numbers on it that seemed to also be "dancing" in time with the music. Mostly wobbling between 110 and 118 with some fractions in between. I had earplugs in, but after a while I realized it was ensuring that the decibels never got above 120, the point at which permanent hearing loss occurs.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
For sheer volume of noise, Def Leppard can't hold a candle to Blue Cheer...what?
Yeah, would be nice to get my hearing back after spending most of the late '70s and early '80s at concerts losing it...not gonna hold my breath, though.
Thanks, but Big Pharma already has a little blue pill to fix what graying, half-deaf Def Leppard fans are actually worried about...
for these poor little guys.
I'm not just a client...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Can you repeat that? I can't hair you? :)
Well, no, I think you're wrong and have it backwards. Listen to an old LP like Boston or Santana Abraxis and you're going to have to have it cranked to hear the soft parts while the loud parts will be LOUD. Back then, audio engineers did all they could to put that last decibel of dynamic range to use. Despite the fact that CDs have a superior range, today's engineers (like you say) have it all cranked. So you're not going to be listening to Pantera as loud as you listened to Led Zeppelin*.
That said, the only ones who are going to lose hearing from music are the musicians themselves. Most people lose their hearing from their jobs; hammers and chain saws and jet engines and factories are far louder than your super-duper high watt car stereo, and orders of magnatude louder than what comes out of an ear bud.
I'm 60 and have been listening to loud rock all my life and I have no hearing problems, although the Air Force doctors detected a 10% loss in my left ear when my enlistment was up, and I immediately knew why they had instituted the rule that the aircraft always has to be to the left of your vehicle -- it's so you only go deaf in one ear. But even after half a century of Led Zeppelin and Van halen and Ozzie and playing my own guitar, my hearing is about what it was back in 1975 when I got out of the USAF.
If you go hunting, wear ear protection. If you work construction wear ear protection. If you work in a factory it's probably mandated.
But don't worry about the music unless you're the drumer or bass player standing right in front of the speaker for four hours five nights a week. If you are, wear ear protection.
Free Martian Whores!
...the current evidence shows that Tinnitus is actually a neurological problem (the sound comes from the brain part of the ear, not the sound-sensing cells themselves) and that treatment for it (the actually effective but only available from about six psychologists in the entire world kind) is a highly-specialized variant of phantom limb pain treatment.
Based on that knowledge I decided to do some experiments with my own Tinnitus.....sitting in a relatively quiet room so the ringing was quite clear, turning on a fan so I could hear some simple white-noise too, and then mentally "pushing" the ring into the sound of the fan. I can't tell you what "pushing" really means....it is just something you have to try and do until you figure it out. It is an internal mental action in which you are trying to consciously act upon the sound itself, and change it.
After practice with this, I can (when I concentrate and do this) exercize some control over the sound. I can't make it stop completely, but I can make some of the frequencies stop (my Tinnitus is polytonal), and I can make some frequencies change into different frequencies.
It isn't much, but it is more than I was lead to believe is possible, and it is a start.
The downside is....it makes you more aware of your tinnitus in the short term (because you are mentally focusing on it and paying attention to it). If you are still in a stage where Tinnitus causes you tension or anxiety, don't try this.
Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, hearing damage is not something most music listeners subject themselves to except at concerts and dance parties. People are much less likely to turn up their headphones until they feel pain than they are to go to a concert and accept a bit of pain in exchange for the experience.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I started having ear hairs sprouting in my late thirties.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
But the key here is range ... as in it has highs and lows. Contrast that with someone like Nickelback, where everything is at a constant volume all the time. I found this interesting in terms of showing the differences.
And this is what's wrong with the world, old geezers are still in control of rock music. You're supposed to be listening to easy listening or Guy Lombardo by now -- you guys fucked everybody and smoked all of the good drugs, and now we can't do any of that. But it's OK, I'm dealing with it. ;-)
I don't know about that, I've been to a few concerts where the ringing lasted for hours afterwards -- and I really didn't like it. In fact, I really don't want to do it again.
I had an old manager who said he's been to so many concerts that most things sound like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon ... an indistinct "wah wah waaah". :-P
If you're listening to headphones loud enough to be causing damage, well, that's your choice. But for concerts and the like? I'll stick with the earplugs myself. It doesn't take all that long to cause damage, and the few times I've had ringing which lasted hours afterwards taught me it's not something I'd like to repeat.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm reading this two minutes after pulling apart a Peavey RAGE guitar amp and showing my daughter how to play Marissa Paternoster's shred near the middle of "I Don't Mind It".
I would be willing to pay a few tens of thousands of dollars to get SILENCE back.
Too late for those of us from the Def Leppard era (I was never a fan, but there was lots of other loud music going on). Might be just in time for the kids of today from the One Direction era (Ha Ha - that's how your generation is going to be defined!!!)
....That this news really needs to fall on deaf ears to be appreciated.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Very relevant post to me - massive Def Leppard fan (35 years old) and have mild tinnitus in one ear from getting headbutted in a soccer game which also burst my ear drum. It would be awesome if there was something they could do to fix my hearing - the ringing is very high pitched, so gets lost amongst ambient sounds, but the real annoying thing is that semi-loud music now distorts in that ear for some reason. I still remember going to concerts in the early 90s like White Zombie where they had posters up all over the walls warning that they weren't responsible for any hearing damage concert goers may suffer. There were concerts where your ears had loud ringing noises in them for 3-4 days after the concert. I always wear ear plugs these days.
I'm hard of hearing. It's not because of noise, I actually can't stand loud sounds at all. It just runs in the family. I've got it, so does dad, so did grandpa, and so on.
While *any* advance in restoring hearing is nice, how about concentrating on helping those of us who never had a choice, rather than those who just stood too close to the speakers?
how are so many aged men with fur-coats growing out of their ears so hard of hearing? (this replaces my bad joke based solely on the headline which was "are you sure you didn't just turn the mice into middle-aged-men?")
Yes, sure is 'fun', isn't it, torturing animals so that worthless humans (including the psychopaths who enjoy torturing them for a 'job') can benefit.
Look at the ridiculous comments, what a bunch of saddoes you are. The only living beings who will ever matter to you in your pathetic lives are those who directly benefit YOU, i.e. YOUR wife, YOUR children, etc.etc. and only because YOU get something out of them.
When was the last time you couldn't sleep because you were thinking about innocent animals being tortured in factory farms, or in vivisection laboratories?
Cue laughable attempts by the aforementioned sociopaths to convince me that they aren't sociopaths...
92% of drugs which work in animal experiments FAIL in human experiments (AKA 'clinical trials'). NO drugs get to market without passing human experiments (AKA 'clinical trials'). An 8% success rate means that animal experiments are medical fraud. Which animal is the correct model for human disease X? We don't know until AFTER the human experiments have been done? Which means ALL animals experiments are a fraud.
Although admittedly I'll be more excited when then can give the Three Blind Mice back their sight.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I am a middle-aged fan of Def Leppard, a mild tinnitus sufferer (starting as early in childhood as I can remember -- so probably neurological), and a weekend warrior front-of-house sound engineer. I think you are completely correct, and not just because of the dynamic range issues you mention.
Despite being a fan since the Hysteria years, it was only about a year and a half ago that I first went to a Def Leppard concert. Knowing that there could be problems and that I value my hearing, I made sure to bring decent ear protection. The sound for the opening act (Heart) was brutal -- piercing, obnoxious, and you couldn't make out lyrics except where you already knew them. I put in my ear plugs and sat down, waiting for the spectacle to be over.
That all changed when Def Leppard took the stage. The music was loud, but everything was also very clear and pleasantly equalized and mixed. It was easily the best mixed live show I've ever had the privilege of hearing, bested perhaps only by Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables touring companies (which aren't dealing with nearly as high of sound pressure levels). Willing to risk it for the experience of hearing my favorite rock band live for the first time in my life I didn't use hearing protection at all, and while my hearing was certainly desensitized until the next morning, there was never a single moment of pain.
I love my weekend hobby as a live sound guy, and the highest complement I've ever received (from a pro) for a rock-style show was that they were impressed that everything felt nice and loud, and they were so happy that their ears didn't hurt afterward. That's a difficult thing to achieve, so I have nothing but admiration for whoever (most likely Ronan McHugh) mixed Def Leppard's show that night.
Cyrano de Maniac
It might be true that most listeners aren't subjecting themselves to great damage over their headphones, but even then I think you're drawing too quick a conclusion with too little data. And certainly on the (not-too-uncommon) instances when I can listen to the music of the guy sitting a few seats down from me on the bus through his headphones, I think there's likely some damage going on there.
Note also that the threshold of pain for hearing is often measured well above where damage starts to occur. Maladaptive, maybe, but it seems to be pretty true nonetheless. And if I'm not mistaken, those studies were done before the current research coming out showing that even when loud sounds do not cause permanent shifts in hearing thresholds, permanent nerve damage is still being done. Thresholds for pain are often well above 100 dB SPL (for broadband stimuli), while damage can be done with prolonged exposure well below that.
Lastly, a minor point, but I don't know what the logarithmic nature of the dB scale has to do with any of this. It's just a scale, a way to place arbitrary numbers on physical phenomena.
But the key here is range ... as in it has highs and lows. Contrast that with someone like Nickelback, where everything is at a constant volume all the time.
That was exactly my point. Listen to Nickleback at three and you;ll hear every note. Listen to Zeppelin's "The Ocean" (on LP, they stupidly compressed the dynamics on the CD) and if it isn't cranked to ten, the soft part in the middle is inaudible. Which is why the older music would have been harder on the ears.
And this is what's wrong with the world, old geezers are still in control of rock music. You're supposed to be listening to easy listening or Guy Lombardo by now -- you guys fucked everybody and smoked all of the good drugs, and now we can't do any of that.
LOL! Actually, today's reefer is far better than all but the best back in the seventies, and you really wouldn't want to smoke elephant tranquilizer (phencyclidine). As to music, well, it's not our fault that we were so good at making music.
I had a discussion with my dad once, who opined that the music of his youth (Glen Miller, Tomy Dorsey) was the best music recorded, but he's wrong. My generation never listened to those old guys and my dad's only 21 years older than me. OTOH today's twentysomething are still listening to the same music I did (and still do) forty years ago.
Of course, back then we used joints and pipes and bongs, and it was a social thing. Today's youth (and even most geezers) use one hitters. I far prefer the old way there.
I don't know about that, I've been to a few concerts where the ringing lasted for hours afterwards
Fire a 20 guage shotgun, just one round, and your ears will ring for hours. Imagine if your job site were as loud as that concert? Most factories are louder. Most everyone I know who's my age and worked in construction or in a factory wear hearing aids.
Free Martian Whores!
Alright. I dug up some further numbers. Most sources recommend keeping exposure below 85 dB. Prolonged exposure to 90 dB and above can cause hearing loss, and pain begins at 120-125 dB. With the right headphones, the old iPod Nano puts out 90 dB at half volume, which is enough to cause permanent damage after eight hours of continuous exposure. So, yeah, you're thoroughly right. Forget the logarithmic thing; I had that backwards. Definitely been too long since I looked at sound stats.
Don't be so quick to judge based on bleeding audio, though; at least not unless you get a good look at the headphones in question. The listener might not be wearing the headphones properly (hence causing leakage) or the headphones may have an open-back design meaning they leak more than usual. I have a pair of (rather old) AKG K240s which do this, and because they're very bulky people assume they must be operating at an exceptionally powerful level—but it's just the lack of a solid casing around the drivers.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Of course you're right, the bleeding audio comment was more of a "damn kids and your music" than a scientific remark. It would actually depend on everything from the design of the headphones to the shape of the listener's ear and its orientation relative to me. I still think it's a reasonable intuition when it's coming over iPod earbuds, leaky as they may be.
This is really good. As of now we can say that some useful transdifferentiation is on the way. Of course this woudnt be so easy in organs with a much complex structure, like the retina, but still a great step forward. We already know that some cells can migrate in the adult brain, like those renewed for smelling. It may only take time for 1+1=2! For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.