In this project, Professor Karen Steel at King’s College London seeks to improve diagnoses of hearing loss by identifying what parts of the ear are damaged, which will contribute to the development of specific treatments.
Project start date: February 2017
Project end date: April 2022
Read about the project outcomes here.
About the project
Age-related hearing loss affects more than 70% of people over the age of 70. There are many underlying causes of hearing loss and different parts of the ear can be affected.
It’s important to know which part of the inner ear is damaged, so that people receive the correct treatment. At the moment, we don’t have this kind of accurate diagnostic tool. In this project, researchers hope to develop a set of tests that can locate the damage within the inner ear of someone with hearing loss.
How it works
The researchers will study mice with well-defined inner ear defects that cause progressive hearing loss (similar to age-related hearing loss), that are likely to reflect similar defects in the human inner ear.
They’ll use a wide range of tests to measure how well the ear is working, using techniques that are already widely used to study hearing loss in people.
Their hearing test results can be specifically matched to the site of damage in their inner ear. This will allow researchers to identify changes in hearing performance that indicate where in the inner ear the damage is. This knowledge could then be transferred to people, and used as diagnostic tools for hearing loss.
How will this research benefit people at risk of hearing loss?
The development of diagnostic tools that can distinguish between different types of inner ear damage will directly contribute to the development of medical treatments.
In addition, once a broader range of treatments is available, these diagnostic tests will help make sure people get the most effective treatment for their hearing loss.
What we’ve learned so far
The researchers developed a panel of mutant mouse lines with different sites of damage within the inner ear: the sound-sensing inner and outer hair cells, the connections with the nerve fibres and a structure called stria vascularis, which generates an electrical potential essential for hearing.
They used a range of tests based on techniques that are in common use in human hearing research and in clinics, including neonatal hearing screens in hospitals. They found that these tests can distinguish between defects to inner hair cells, outer hair cells and connections with nerve fibres. However, they cannot discriminate dysfunction due to the stria vascularis.
Currently, they are extending the range of tests to explore additional potential ways of distinguishing stria vascularis dysfunction from other primary defects within the inner ear. This will be a key type of dysfunction to identify, because unless the stria vascularis functions normally it is unlikely that any treatments for hair cell or neural defects will be successful.
About the researcher
Professor Karen Steel is Professor of Sensory Function at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King’s College London. She was awarded an RNID Discovery Research Grant for this project in 2017.
I would like my research to lead to the availability of drugs that can slow or halt the progression of hearing loss, and even better, reverse hearing loss.”
