Therefore, the opinions and statements made in all articles and replies do not represent the official opinions of MGH and MGH Neurology. Neither is MGH or MGH Neurology responsible for the content of any articles or replies. No messages are screened for content. People, Please pay attention to this sentence in this article. 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. 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.