Studies in multiple species, including in post-mortem human tissue, have shown that normal
aging and/or acoustic overexposure can lead to a significant loss of afferent synapses …

Understanding the biology of the previously underappreciated sensitivity of cochlear
synapses to noise insult, and its clinical consequences, is becoming a mission for a growing …

Cochlear synaptopathy (or hidden hearing loss), due to noise exposure or aging, has been
demonstrated in animal models using histological techniques. However, diagnosis of the …

Auditory de-afferentation, a permanent reduction in the number of inner-hair-cells and
auditory-nerve synapses due to cochlear damage or synaptopathy, can reliably be …

Aging listeners experience greater difficulty understanding speech in adverse listening
conditions and exhibit degraded temporal resolution, even when audiometric thresholds are …

Hearing loss caused by noise exposure, ototoxic drugs, or aging results from the loss of
sensory cells, as reflected in audiometric threshold elevation. Animal studies show that loss …

Aging listeners, even in the absence of overt hearing loss measured as changes in hearing
thresholds, often experience impairments processing temporally complex sounds such as …

Investigations of cochlear synaptopathy in living humans rely on proxy measures of auditory
nerve function. Numerous procedures have been developed, typically based on the auditory …

Although there is strong histological evidence for age-related synaptopathy in humans,
evidence for the existence of noise-induced cochlear synaptopathy in humans is …

Evidence from animal and human studies suggests that moderate acoustic exposure,
causing only transient threshold elevation, can nonetheless cause “hidden hearing loss” that …