Afferent innervation of the cochlea by the auditory nerve declines during aging and
potentially after sound overexposure, producing the common pathology known as cochlear …

Recent studies on animal models have shown that noise exposure that does not lead to
permanent threshold shift (PTS) can cause considerable damage around the synapses …

Speech intelligibility can vary dramatically between individuals with similar clinically defined
severity of hearing loss based on the audiogram. These perceptual differences, despite …

Many individuals with seemingly normal hearing abilities struggle to understand speech in
noisy backgrounds. To understand why this might be the case, we investigated the neural …

Tinnitus and hyperacusis are life-disrupting perceptual abnormalities that are often
preceded by acoustic overexposure. Animal models of overexposure have suggested a link …

Loss of auditory-nerve (AN) afferent cochlear innervation is a prevalent human condition that
does not affect audiometric thresholds and therefore remains largely undetectable with …

Previous work in animals with recovered hearing thresholds but permanent inner hair cell
synapse loss after noise have suggested initial vulnerability of low spontaneous rate (SR) …

Dramatic results from recent animal experiments show that noise exposure can cause a
selective loss of high-threshold auditory nerve fibers without affecting absolute sensitivity …

The classic view of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is that the “primary” targets are hair
cells, and that cochlear-nerve loss is “secondary” to hair cell degeneration. Our work in …

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 …