Find in News Talk Sites Images For advanced search options, click here . Subscribe for free email updates . Click here to sign up, or log in . Researchers in the University at Buffalo Center for Hearing and Deafness have shown for the first time that a compound called leupeptin may help protect against the noise-induced hearing loss caused by living in noisy industrialized societies. Using an animal model, researchers found that treating the inner ear with leupeptin before exposure to high-level noise, comparable to a jet engine, reduced the loss of sensory hair cells by 60 percent.
Hair cells convert sound waves into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.
Leupeptin, however, did not protect against the damaging effects of the anti-cancer drug carboplatin that can cause deafness in treated patients. First, they provide clues to the cellular events that lead to sensory-cell death in the inner ear. Second, they suggest a potential drug-therapy approach to protecting the ear against sound damage. Salvi and his colleagues at UB and his collaborators, Alfred Stracher, Ph.D., and Abraham Shulman, Ph.D., both at the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn, have been investigating ways to protect the auditory system from damage via noise and ototoxic drugs, common causes of deafness in Western societies. This study was based on the knowledge that, in many cases, degeneration of nerve function is caused by a cascade of events, beginning with a trauma that induces an increase of calcium in nerve cells.