Current Approaches to Study the Aging Cochlea

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Amarins N. Heeringa

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg

Dr. Amarins N. Heeringa is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Christine Köppl, at the Department of Neuroscience of the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Within the Cluster of Excellence “Hearing4All”, she is studying the functional consequences of cochlear aging on sound encoding in single auditory-nerve fibers. In 2007, she received her BSc degree in Life Science & Technology and in 2010, her MSc degree in Neuroscience, both from the University of Groningen. She obtained her PhD from the ENT department at the University Medical Center Groningen in 2014, where she studied the neurophysiological effects of acoustic trauma in the inferior colliculus, in the laboratory of Dr. Pim van Dijk. Next, she worked as an international research fellow at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute, University of Michigan in the lab of Dr. Susan Shore. In the frame of that postdoctoral project, Dr. Heeringa investigated the role of non-auditory connections to the ventral cochlear nucleus in temporal encoding of amplitude-modulated sounds and in tinnitus. Since 2017, she works at the University of Oldenburg, where she moved her electrode even further peripheral by studying responses in single-auditory nerve fibers, the gateway between the peripheral and central auditory system.

Nicholas S. Andresen

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Nicholas Andresen is a resident physician in the Department of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He studied biology and philosophy at Luther College before obtaining his medical degree from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. He is currently studying age-related hearing loss in mouse models and human temporal bones in the lab of Dr. Amanda Lauer. Following the completion of residency training he plans to pursue a fellowship in neurotology.

Collection Overview

Age-related hearing loss, or presbycusis, is characterized by progressive high-frequency hearing loss that affects 30% of individuals over the age of 65. Researchers studying the pathophysiology of the aging cochlea within humans or animal models face unique challenges. Specifically, the cochlea is embedded within dense bone that calcifies and becomes increasingly brittle with age, while the sensory and neural tissue contained within this bone become more fragile. Studying delicate aged cochlear tissue requires researchers to develop distinct, specialized techniques for performing histologic and functional analyses.

Specific histologic and physiologic methods have been developed that allow for the analysis of aged cochlear tissue in both animals and humans. For example, researchers may now study individual synapses and record from single hair cells and auditory nerve fibers. Advanced imaging techniques can provide a view of the aged cochlea without disrupting its fragile structure. These tools can be supplemented by methods of genetic or computational modeling that allow the study of aging without the necessity of using aged animals or postmortem human tissue. This methods collection aims to summarize the scientific techniques that have been developed to study the aging cochlea in order to advance the study and understanding of presbycusis.