Restoring Hearing Loss?

There was some positive news from my Good News Network newsletter. 

<a href=”https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/mit-reverses-hearing-loss-stimulating-hair-growth-in-the-inner-ear/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_medium=weekly_mailout&utm_source=05-04-2022>MIT Researchers Reverse Hearing Loss By Regenerating Inner Ear Hair Growth</a>  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a spin-off called Frequency Therapeutics.  They had been researching how to restore hearing loss and have come up with a promising injection to stimulate hair growth in the inner ear.

Our ears have three parts: outer, where the canal leads to the middle, which has the tiny bones that conduct sound.  The inner ear has the cochlea, where we all have little hairs that vibrate and send sound through its nerve to the brain.  And then we hear.

We can begin to lose our hearing for different reasons.  If there’s a dysfunction in the middle ear, it causes a conductive loss.  The little bones aren’t communicating with the cochlea.  In addition, although we’re born with thousands of cochlear hair, they begin to die off and aren’t replaced.  When too many of the hairs die, a person becomes deaf.  The hairs can die simply as we age or they die from noise exposure, antibiotics or chemotherapies.

Before we’re born, we have progenitor cells that will eventually become specific hairs, like for the cochlea.  What the researchers discovered was that using a regenerative therapy to stimulate the progenitor cells helped improved a hearing-impaired individual’s ability to understand and participate in his or her surroundings.  They use molecules in an injection into the inner ear to do this and the hope is that restoring hearing will be like lasik surgery that restores vision.

My husband, Ted, was a sheet metal worker for most of his working career.  His work environment was very noisy and, over the years, he lost a lot of his hearing.  The last time he had an audiogram, the numbers showed profound deafness.  He is fortunate in that he can use his residual hearing and lipreading to help him socialize.

I know how isolating hearing loss can be.  My parents were Deaf.  They didn’t mingle with hearing people; until there was captioning, they couldn’t understand everything they saw on TV.  They were complete lost in family gatherings where many members would be speaking almost simultaneously.  However, they were very active in the Deaf community and that was where they would socialize. 

It's not so for hearing people who lose their hearing later in life.  Some do blend into the Deaf community, learning to sign and reconnect with people.  Others, who are older, have a tough time learning sign language.  My husband is one of those people.  People with hearing loss who aren’t able to lipread well or use residual hearing find themselves lonely and isolated.

I am hopeful for this therapy.  I think Ted would benefit from it.  I also think he might benefit from a cochlear implant because he’s already familiar with speech and would adapt well.  Understandably, though, he has no interest in having a hole drilled in his skull, destroying whatever residual hearing he has to implant a device that would act like the cochlea.

From what I read, I don’t know that the therapy would benefit people like my parents, who were born deaf and grew into adulthood.  Maybe it could work for deaf babies?  I wonder.

Proofing this after the fact, I realize I need to practice my html LOL