The failure of the prior trial was suspected, and I believe it, due to a refractory response by overdosing the inner ear with too frequent administrations of the drug, and then testing for effect too soon. I bet even those candidates of the phase IIa trial though would, if checked on now, show some improvement.
Animal research has shown that natural cochlear hair cell regeneration and resultant hearing restoration is very real, we mammals just don't have the natural cellular signaling to redifferentiate those base cells - small molecule drugs like FX322 do exactly that. I am optimistic they'll eventually find the right dosing regimen to see reliable and optimal clinical effect, and it will be a seismic advance in medicine.
“Animal research has shown that natural cochlear hair cell regeneration and resultant hearing restoration is very real” - Although exciting, we also need to remember that translatability rates from animal models to humans is notoriously low, usually in the single digits for most therapeutic areas. This is some cool tech, but just wanted to point it out that success in animal models =/= we will eventually get to see the realized treatment.
> Although exciting, we also need to remember that translatability rates from animal models to humans is notoriously low, usually in the single digits for most therapeutic areas.
This is true of humans as well -- there are plenty of programs that get interesting and clear results in Phase 2 (the dose ranging phase: essentially "what dosage is most efficacious") that die in Phase 3 (roughly: "OK, how does that dose really work on a statistically significant population that also represents the demographics of the country"). These studies are so expensive that nobody goes into Phase 3 unless they believe Phase 2 pretty certainly demonstrated that the drug works, and well.
It's also hard to figure out just how the animal's hearing is improving (you can't simply ask). I'm sure they have some experiments, but growing the hairs back may be necessary but not sufficient. Look at all those Alzheimers programs aimed at removing the plaque that haven't demonstrated any value in the clinic. The plaque might not even be alzheimers itself -- it could merely be the body's response to some different underlying effect of the disease.
The choice of animal is very important, and the FDA cares a lot. Mice are popular because they are cheap. I worked on a program years ago that used guinea pigs because mice couldn't get the disease. We didn't use rats as the compound caused cancer in rats, and someone else had had their program derailed because the FDA required a separate analysis and study to demonstrate that the cancer was specific to rats and not other species (rats get lots of cancers). For our program the FDA required some studies in (non-guinea) pigs before they were willing to allow any human trials.
It's also hard to figure out just how the
animal's hearing is improving (you can't simply ask)
This seems relatively easy, right? Play a sound at a given frequency, associate it with a food reward. Like Pavlov's dog, but vary the frequency of the bell.
Oversimplification obviously, and "easy" is extreme relative to all the other hard parts involved but that part seems very doable
One sobering lesson from my time working in the life sciences is that everything is insanely complex and once you've isolated everything in your problem space into a small, relatively isolated set, you still end up with an insanely complex space.
You are right, but so is the grandparent. A noise, click, or tone-based ABR is very basic in terms of measuring restoration of natural hearing. There are issues of rich spectrotempral aspects of speech, music, and natural sounds that (ideally) would be accounted for. Along with amplification and gain control, to which Outer Hair Cells are a major contributor in the cochlea.
There are various ways to measure these thing in animals and humans physiologically (ABRs, otoacoustic emissions, invasive and noninvasive electrophysiology), and with careful psychophysical experiments. None are perfect or comprehensive. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses.
But it is indeed more complex than just testing a basic audibility threshold. The same issues come up with audigorams for hearing aid calibration and hearing in noise.
Well, there's more to it than binary to text you. I agree with you, in that the signaling perception is probably easy. However, let's say that that frequency is coupled with several others, making for noise for poor discrimination.
For that kind of thing, we're going to need real people who can communicate in detail.
The brain also needs time to "rewire" once it starts accepting more and better input.
"Rotating your eyeball" as a treatment for macular degeneration is a good example. Your brain needs a week or so to "reorient" even though the physical procedure is done in a couple hours.
I guess you can easily damage a rats/monkeys hearing consistently (may we find peace for our sins) and I guess you can easily strap those animals into an MRI or strap an EEG measuring device onto one.
Seems simpler than training a significant amount of them!
Unlike your Alzheimer’s example, hair cell loss is definitely the cause of hearing loss in many cases. There are other possible causes but this is the first or second most common biological antecedent.
Basically, if we can regrow them, there’s a good chance of restoring hearing, provided the rest of the auditory system hasn’t atrophied too badly.
I have increasing;y bad tinnitus. Will this help with that?
I hear a permanent and constant low-volume very high pitch "squeal" in my ears at all times,
I was never a big loud music listener, and I have always brought ear-plugs to loud events - and have had no big ear-rupturing moments (such as a gun firing close to my head without protection etc...
This sounds crazy, but try hearing aids. That worked for me. Initially I used the white noise masking feature of them, but switched to using just amplification. I stop noticing my tinnitus a few minutes after I put them in, and it starts again a few minutes after I take them out.
In the spirit of "there's a forum for everything," you can get help programming them yourself here:
Try masking sounds. Your brain has an amazingly capable AGC and absent other sound it can create sound out of just about nothing including sounds that aren't there. Playing very (-30 dB) soft white noise may be just enough to stop your brain from doing its thing and after a short while the white noise itself will fade into the background. This helped me tremendously when I had a nasty case of tinnitus myself (which lasted for years).
That is an open question. Tinnitus is NOT well understood. It does have fairly high correlation with SNHL, which IS pretty well understood as a matter of cochlear hair cell destruction. So there is a lot of optimism that if we can treat the latter, the former will go away, but there may be other components to it in the central nervous system. It certainly would only help to fix SNHL in trying to treat tinnitus.
True, talking to a hearing specialist, they didnt know histidine can reduce hearing loss, now whether this is due to histidine being a precursor for histamine which can help white blood cells move through tissue, or because it can play its part in remyelinating nerves isnt clear.
Manganese could also play a part because its the most abundant metal in hair samples which might translate to the hairs in the ear. However to get it there, you'll need to increase your cysteine intake, but we dont absorb it easily through the gut so we have to use N Acetyl Cysteine...
Ibuprofen increases blood pressure, which is associated with higher levels of tinnitus. You might check in with your GP - maybe some intervention to lower blood pressure could reduce your overall tinnitus?
I feel much better about getting a custom mouthguard for my bruxism now. Also, in case anyone is wondering, it was well worth the insane price for a piece of molded plastic.
Mouth guards for American football, customized by heating and biting them, are pretty cheap in my experience. Not sure how workable they are for other issues.
I had odd bouts of tinitus as a teenager, like you, no obvious causes. It went away and came back with a vengence about 15 years ago. That lasted a year or so but over time it's become more of a minor irritation than a major handicap. I guess, my brain has trained itself to deal with it?
The only tip I can give you is to always have some kind of background sound that you can focus on rather than the buzzing in your own head.
Also, avoid earplugs and headphones, they just create a wierd feedback loop.
The best advice I ever got about my tinnitus was from my mom, who has worse tinnitus than I do: "just forget about it". I know that might sound difficult, but honestly, just try. When you notice it, reassure yourself that it's not really a big problem, and then turn your attention to other things. If you are successful with this, eventually you will only notice it when you remember that you have it and listen for it.
A couple of the things I used to tell myself when it troubled me more than it does now:
- There's nothing you can do about this, so just forget about it.
- We all accumulate damage as we age. None of us are going into the grave in prime condition and if we do, that's a mark of a life not well-lived.
- The fact I can hear this noise means I'm alive: "I hear ringing, therefore I am".
These may not be helpful to you, so invent your own!
The other thing I would recommend is getting a hearing test. If it turns out you have hearing loss, then treatment for that (e.g. hearing aids) may reduce your tinnitus (one theory is that tinnitus is caused by your brain "turning up the gain" on your "audio inputs", so that when you have a hearing aid, your brain no longer needs to do that, and your tinnitus diminishes).
If it turns out you don't have hearing loss, then you can reassure yourself that your tinnitus is not a sign of any damage. I had always assumed my tinnitus was the result of damage due to a lot of music events but it turns out I have excellent hearing, which helps me ignore my tinnitus, because I no longer view it as proof that I hurt myself.
You may also notice that certain things make your tinnitus worse. For instance, if I have a few drinks, mine gets noticeably louder. But because I know the alcohol will wear off, I just ignore it because it's temporary.
One tip that was indeed helpful in learning to ignore it, especially when I was new to tinnitus was: don't keep checking your tinnitus level. Once I stopped checking "Do I hear it now? Is it as loud?" I started minding/noticing it less.
It's interesting advice. I don't even consider myself as "having tinnitus". However, if I sit in a quiet room and concentrate I can certainly hear a background whine. I feel like I have always had that. Is that tinnitus?
It’s a good question and the jury is sort of out on that. That is what tinnitus is like, yes, but on the other hand, in an exceptionally quiet environment it is possible to hear things like the blood rushing in your ears - and tinnitus can also manifest as a roaring sound. I think it is fairly normal to hear something in very quiet environments, even if you don’t have tinnitus.
With that said, my advice to you is, don’t do that. ;) Maybe you have it, maybe you don’t, so probably best to just ignore it, because it’s not a problem unless you start paying attention to it.
Interestingly, having this conversation on HN has made mine more noticeable, so, I better move on too!
I had pretty severe tinnitus. Getting religious about earplug usage at music performances plus getting musician-specific hearing protection pretty well put it into remission. Cymbals with no earplugs are specifically the worst.
My personal albeit anecdotal evidence is that certain foods, or possibly too much sodium, can cause tinnitus. When I have tinnitus I drink a lot of water and reduce my sodium intake - I think that acesulfame postassium (NutraSweet) can cause it for me as well.
You might want to experiment with changing your diet, drinking more water, etc.
I do eat a lot of sodium, but here is an interesting anecdote:
A friend's husband had Lyme Disease - and had very bad veritgo from it which was exacerbated by a high sodium intake (I assume the ear works on the sodium potassium pump in some manner?)
but she used to have to make a very careful diet for him so as to remove sodium as much as possible, which would prevent his vertigo.
"Where an inflammatory component is suspected in bilateral Ménière’s disease, short courses of systemic glucocorticoids may be appropriate. It recently has been shown that glucocorticoids not only influence inflammatory process in Ménière’s disease, but also alter fluid dynamics via an interaction with the sodium pumps in the semicircular canals (Ponduglula et al 2004). Intra-tympanic application of corticosteroids appears to have only temporary effects (Dodson 2004) and is probably not recommended"
I have tinnitus too, and would love a cure/solution. I do play drums and have been exposed to loud music, but my tinnitus nevertheless developed from a glandular fever, and my hearing is actually fine. Would just love to get rid of the constant 3-4khz sine waves and enjoy silence again.
I vaguely remember hearing something about tapping on the back of your head can greatly reduce tinnitus. I think there are plenty of instructional videos on youtube and it's worth a shot to try.
I've tried this in the past and, for me, it never helped for more than a few minutes. But it DID work. It's amazing how interconnected various systems in our bodies can be and how little we truly understand.
It helps some but only for tens of seconds to a minute. Just enough for a tech preview or nostalgia trip (depending on your level of optimism or acceptance), not a solution.
There was suspected fraud on the part of the C(E?)O that he was soliciting investor money (and sold stock himself) with advance knowledge of the disappointing results of the trial I was mentioning and did not disclose it. Class action suits were filed.
The trials preceding the Phase IIa results were all extremely promising, and even the Phase IIa one showed statistically significant effect on a sound discrimination, which many long time hearing sufferers can tell you is even more frustrating a problem than the inability to perceive sound.
Biomedical research stocks are inherently risky. I could be deluding myself, but my lay reading of the research, and as someone who has suffered from tinnitus for a long time brought on my noise overexposure, I think there is a very promising shot at this drug. Maybe FREQ will not be the ones to realize it and some other company will take the patent into real life clinical medicine, and FREQ is certainly not the ONLY company pursuing this angle. But their successes so far have kept me holding the stock, and I keep buying more.
Interesting approach, I'd love to see it work. But given the mixed results plus the class action lawsuits that still seem unsettled (at least I didn't find any news), this doesn't really seem investable to me. Biotech startups are risky enough even without such problems.
Why would they deliberately come up with a study design that harms their evaluation, trust, reputation, etc. and not one that optimized for best lab-condition results, like any sensible hair loss product company, for example?
I don't think any failure was deliberate. This is the cutting edge of cochlear medical research, and mistakes will happen. Perhaps they thought a little was good and more would be better? I am neither an employee or board member.
The article says the treatment focuses on increased speech intelligibility. Speech, depending on how you define it, can occupy a fairly narrow range of the audio spectrum that humans can perceive.
My hearing loss is mostly on the high end (10-12K and above) and impedes my ability to hear speech in noisy environments. More troubling has been the inability to enjoy music/sound in those upper ranges, resulting in the music lacking a certain sparkle and brilliance.
I hope this therapy regenerates hair cells across the entire spectrum.
Check out Crescendo (http://refined-audiometrics.com/wordpress1/) -- an engineer/musician with a hearing loss similar to yours has developed a piece of software that's like a "super" hearing aid (non-linear compression per Bark band) that helps to bring the sparkle back for music.
Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!
It is a multi-band nonlinear compressor. It deals with each band of hearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale) individually. In each band, it elevates soft sounds to just past the threshold of audibility with someone's impaired hearing, to make it sound like the softest sound they can hear. And it elevates medium sounds a little bit less, to make it sound like a medium sound. And it elevates loud sounds not much at all. Hence the nonlinearity.
This reminds me of one aspect of my hearing loss that's been hard to explain.
Amplification doesn't fix everything. My hearing loss is complex, a mix of conduction problems in the middle ear and something neurological as well. I can hear very high and very low frequencies surprisingly well. There's a big bite out of the main speech band, though.
I find that speech, with background noise, that goes through a mediocre microphone, 200 - 3000 Hz pass filter, and then a digital compression codec, and then through a loudspeaker -- no matter how loud -- can sometimes be nearly unintelligible to me. It's loud enough. But I can't figure out which sound that's supposed to be. It's just too distorted.
I take my hearing aids out to listen to music, most of the time. Despite usually being able to better hear the melody and lyrics with the hearing aids in. Because I know the sparkle you speak of, and it's wrecked by all but the very best-quality electronic amplification. Some people think it's odd that I'm finnicky about quality speakers, etc. when I'm half deaf. But every decibel of SNR counts when I lose most of it in my head.
(And I too hope one day they can fix that for both of us.)
The other thing you miss with hearing aids, and even headphones, are the low frequencies picked up more by the body than the ears. Sunn O))), for example. I’d rather listen raw, too, but I raise the level somewhat, which can bother others.
What I probably need is a DAC for my sound system. The music streaming services like Apple don’t provide an adequate way to equalize the audio and balance to compensate for my hearing loss.
Edit: I keep hoping that Apple will do a better job here with their next release of AirPods Pro. One of the problems with Apple Music is they set the max volume too low. I can sort of understand the desire to help people protect their hearing, but their max level is less than IRL, and there is no way to bypass that setting.
Tidal is better. And there are plenty of YouTube channels I listen to at half volume, so it’s not the Apple hardware causing the problem.
I tend to listen to instrumental music. In part that's because I play an instrument, and in part it's likely due to hearing loss making words not that easy to understand. I also find I prefer vocals in foreign languages since there's no point in trying to understand them.
There's still plenty of good music out there.
I also find that my hearing aids aren't great for music due to how much they change timbre from boosting the high end, so I use regular ear buds instead.
As my own normal, age related roll off advances, I find all the good stuff is under 10 to 12Khz.
I mentioned different eq curves down thread. I don't have a lot of technical data at hand, but older radios from the vacuum tube era where they had response over 10 khz.
A good one, play that a respectable volume in a room, sounds pretty great!
What I'm kind of hinting at here is there maybe Equalization curves that can satisfy our need for that bright open sense that is missing when the higher frequencies are also missing.
That's not surprising, as what we think of as "presence" is usually in the ~4 KHz range, where our ears are the most sensitive. What's over 10 KHz may provide a sense of "air" but doesn't convey as much information.
I think I've read something about the brain being able to use harmonics of the frequencies in question to "reconstruct" what's lacking. IIRC this is how Waves MaxBass works. This could be an added effect of your tube gear, which will be generating more harmonic content.
Another thought I had is how filters differ from an organic lack of response. Filtering wide band audio introduces artifacts. Those can be heard on AM every day in the US in the stations using brick wall type 5Khz filters.
A wideband signal run through something with low response is different!
And the cutoff matters.
No matter what the gear, a 5khz cutoff is crappy. 8khz can be good, and 10 can be hard for many to tell given good gear and quality source audio.
Once, I was able to listen to a great jazz recording on a older tube stereo. 50's era gear.
Playing vinyl on it was a terrible experience for both the listener and the vinyl. A recording done on tape was kind of amazing! The device was mone, pretty sure was a Zenith, and it had a cool baffle system on the speaker. One "tuned it for the room" by pulling a knob in and out. That shaped the low and mid range.
Was better than I would expect for that overall bandwidth.
Have you played around with an equalizer (hardware or software, doesn't matter) that offers rather extreme adjustments like +15dB or more, to see if you can approximate a flat source+ear system? Or is your loss more like a brickwall filter than a 12dB/octave slope for example?
I'm an audio engineer, not an audiologist, so I'm just shooting from the hip here as it's something I've been curious about in case I develop a similar issue as I age.
Please don't do this. This would work for a conductive hearing loss (ear drum or bones in your ear messed up, etc.) but not for a sensorineural hearing loss (like what you get from aging or from noise exposure). You need non-linear compression to compensate for loudness recruitment. At a basic level, when you have sensorineural hearing loss, soft sounds will sound way softer than they should (or be below the threshold of audibility), but loud sounds will sound about the same as they should. If you crank up the volume for the affected frequency bands to make it sound right for soft sounds, then with loud transients, it will sound way too loud, and potentially do more damage to your hearing.
Quite right! I’m quite “deaf” in the sense that I can’t understand what people are saying - they sound muffled (and I can’t separate two people talking at once anymore).
But, I’m actually quite sensitive to loud noises!
What I need is equalization and compression, so I can hear the soft noises. I don’t need much, if any, overall gain.
Why can’t Apple provide that, they have all the necessary technology at hand?
Do hearing aids offer this sort of multiband compression? I've heard about hearing aids that act as Bluetooth headphones, so presumably your Apple device could send its unaltered audio over Bluetooth and then the hearing aid's custom programming could handle things from there?
Yes, they do (in fact, they have custom hardware to do it), but the power budget is very, very small, so there have to be tradeoffs made, both in terms of the processing and in terms of the actual transducer.
People are used to recharging AirPods frequently, and their hardware exceeds what is in a hearing aid. So, I wish Apple would enter this underserved market and stop just making "works with iPhone" deals with the hearing aid companies.
Another thing they could try would be a different eq curve overall.
I always find The Sound of Music as reproduced on older narrow band with am radios and phonographs interesting. A lot of that gear doesn't really produce anything over 10 khz.
But, where they emphasized frequencies in the spectrum is different from Modern equipment, which basically is shooting for flat response.
My grandfather's old radio, when played in a room have a comfortable volume, sounds really good. It's present. And even when I use the little transmitter to send it an idealized signal, it had a roll off starting around 8khz, the absolute high-end was maybe 12khz.
I never took the time to analyze it in detail, and kind of wish I had. The usual 62-100 hurts emphasis, like what you'll find on your typical loudness button on a 70's or 80's stereo was there. But it also shaped the sound in 3 to 8khz range.
The end result was a very natural sound the didn't overpower, felt like it should be there in the room with all the other sounds.
Wish I could say more but I'm not where I have any detail information. I can say the enjoyment of the music is different, and fulfilling. It's not bright, like those higher frequencies bring to the overall feel of the program being produced.
Robust, full, seem descriptive... clear is another one. Often, when I hear high bandwidth audio, through limited devices, it seems muddy, unclear, not precise. Those older radios are not like that. Well, the better ones anyway.
In any case, the eq is different, and that impacts our perception related to the overall feel of the sound.
Sorry for the typos. I'm doing this with the voice dictation. I may actually go back and revisit this myself. As I age up I'm getting be expected, natural roll off most all of us get in our later years.
Yeah I think that is true. However I was really speaking to something a little older than that, though vinyl could still be a source signal for it.
You go back far enough, and the gear starts to roll off about 10 khz, yet if you listen to a modern signal through it, it sounds good. That's what I'm getting at.
I have sudden deafness in my left ear (meaning: I just woke up deaf one day and they don't know why) in exactly the frequency range used for speech. Even more than a decade later it feels weird that I can still hear certain common background noises but humans are almost completely silent on my left side
> I have sudden deafness in my left ear (meaning: I just woke up deaf one day and they don't know why)
Ah, me too, but no sound at all. A specialist told me it was caused by a virus, but I never looked into which one, or asked for more info.. There was no treatment, except cochlear implant, which didn't sound too great. Hopefully it doesn't happen in the other ear also!
I miss being able to hear every little note with full range. A combination of construction noise and some loud music did it for me and I can’t even “imagine” music with full range in my head like I use to before my hearing damage and tinnitus.
For anybody suffering with tinnitus I highly recommend the protocol William Shatner went through. You can train your brain so it’s not noticeable any more. Like wearing pants, it fades into the background.
I had tinnitus in my left ear, but it turned out to be related to TMJ, and it resolved after I wore an advanced lightwire functional (ALF) appliance for maybe 3-6 months to move my jaw back into a forward position. I had braces and wore headgear as a kid at the height of some 1980s hysteria about overbites that left millions of people like me with class II malocclusion (baby face) and sleep apnea.
I'm having trouble finding information on it, because there's a lot more money in orthodontics than palatal expansion:
Right now I'm wearing Invisalign but have a small 1/2 tooth gap where the new bone has formed and am having trouble finding an orthodontist that will move molars forward to catch up. It's like asking someone who just dug a giant hole to fill it in again. It may require a temporary anchorage devices (TAD) or lever arm to move the teeth without tipping them.
The programmer in me senses a code smell here where the orthodontics profession maybe shouldn't endorse practices it can't undo. But all I can really do is spread the word and encourage anyone considering braces to get a second opinion, especially for children. They may just need to wear a retainer for a year or two and learn good tongue posture habits, especially while they're still growing.
Any suggestions for someone with an overbite? I went to some orthos who recommended removing two premolars, others suggesting jaw surgery. in the end I went to elastics + invsialign though I can't seem but to feel that the elastics are doing nothing
Just ask yourself: does the encouragement of such non-holistic practices as removing healthy teeth sound more like science or quackery?
To shed some light on what's going on here, I feel that the Herbst appliance is the best up through the late teenage years, but notice how info on it is behind a kind of industry blacklist:
As of this writing on Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022, the above Wikipedia entry is blank. That's what I mean about the programmer in me smelling so many code smells here that something doesn't add up.
IMHO what's going on is that the practice of orthodontics was created before things like dental implants went mainstream or were even thought feasible. So today, rather than headgear, it's better to just install the temporary anchorage devices (TAD) that I mentioned, then use a more consistently-applied force from bands or screws to move any tooth exactly where it needs to go. I feel that orthodontists who are reluctant to do this haven't kept up with the literature, or are afraid to do work outside of the niche they're comfortable in, indicating that their professional development work might have fallen behind.
In short, get a second opinion and/or find a better orthodontist.
But it sounds like you're on a good track. Just remember that you're moving roots (not teeth), so bigger teeth take longer because they have more. Also you're moving a lot of teeth, so each one has to move a millimeter, then the next, and so on. So molars may take an order of magnitude longer to move than smaller teeth.
I'll likely need one of these techniques to close my gaps, even though they're from new bone growth from the ALF instead of lost teeth:
I've read there are mouth shapers that full your jaw forward that significantly helps with sleep apnea. but at the same time it kills your bite, and reforms your jaw.
any recommendations?
tangentially I also have tinnitus so now I'm wondering if it's related.
Hmmm, I've not heard anything re: bite killing. It's definitely had points where it affected my ability to chew due to things shifting, but that's been easily countered each time by my Ortho just shaving down or adjusting the appliance - it's been due to my bite putting more pressure on the left or right row as I adjust. Other than that, over ~6 months so far I haven't really had much to note. I just wear it while sleeping and periodically while coding (since I'm not needing to talk during that... it's like "free time" for it to work) and it "just works".
Quality of sleep is through the roof, I'd forgotten what good sleep is like. If I miss a night of sleep with it (e.g, I travel and forgot to bring it with me) I absolutely feel it the next day.
Tinnitus-wise, I noticed that it got worse at first but then settled and is actually more in the background than it used to be. FWIW, I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so I'd consider myself ~90% habituated to it - it doesn't bother me outside of any concern of it getting worse. I think this has made it easier for me to objectively judge whether something is helping or not - if my tinnitus is never cured, but never gets worse, I'll be fine.
https://vivos.com is what my Ortho got me on. I can't speak to others, but this has worked well for me so far.
Sorry, poor wording on my part, I meant something related to a bad bite (like TMJ). I had worn a joint on one side like a bad knee, but not the other. So the ALF realigned my bite by making room for the teeth to be where they wanted to be, so the joint could open back up. Good point though, my situation might be something unrelated, and I don't know if there's a correlation between TMJ and tinnitus.
Berard Auditory Integration Training and the Tomatis Method are also worth looking into depending on what's going on; a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" goes into detail on the above treatments.
The Tomatis Method is a little pseudoscience-y for my tastes -- you have to buy the tapes / app / etc. directly from the Tomatis folks, and I've never seen any good studies from a non-conflicted third party that support its efficacy.
All of the science and math behind the algorithms are available - you can recreate it yourself, but like most things it's easier to buy what someone else has already put the work in. I'd recommend getting and reading the book to balance out a perspective.
Thanks for the pointer, I'll be looking it up shortly.
Anecdotaly, I've found myself getting a phantom tone in the 15khz range (sounds just like a flyback) when in a quiet house. This could be entitely placebo effect, but I've gotten some relief by doing a bad emulation of active noise cancelling headphones, namely
playing a quiet 15khz (ish) tone through my bone conduction headphones. It's not perfect by any means, but often the very act of trying to tune my tone generator to the right frequency can be enough to stop it annoying me (it becomes less noticeable).
I developed it as a kid, and even though I feel a lot of anxiety in life, I don’t feel anxious about it.
Maybe it’s easier for us to accept certain things when we are younger. if it happened today I probably would be more anxious about it. It also helps that mine hasn’t gotten worse - I noticed it, took corrective action, and continue to be mindful about it thru today
I'm not them. But in my case, meditation and being mindful made it worse. Browsing a ton of social media and being perpetually distracted in the attention economy's exploitation has helped me.
There's a crazy amount of problems that are due to hearing loss. There's an increased risk of dementia. Even for balance from hearing audio cues when walking.
My mother has poor hearing and she refuses to get a hearing aid mainly due to cost. They are ~$4K per ear she doesn't have the money but to her an elderly person she imagines it as $40K/ear. I also fear dementia has already begun for her. For me I have tinnitus so this drug would also be welcome.
Another interesting drug is Vuity for nearsightedness. Between hearing and sight it will be amazing if such drugs work and were available before my mother or I or anyone dies of old age.
Where do you live? There are many, MANY different kinds of hearings in many different price ranges. I have a top of the line OPN 1 and it was 3,000$. There are cheaper versions for 2k. Many manufacturers produce models under 2k. I'd advise to have her check again, perhaps with a different audiologist.
Heck, if she gets an earmold, I can give her my old Oticon Chili. I bet there are other avenues to procure a cheap one.
I'm Canada but the devices are not covered by the government but maybe by Mom's drug/health plan. Mom has insurance but I don't know what it covers and she probably doesn't either but I'm sure it must cover hearing aids. She refuses to even talk about them other than what my sister and I manage to pry out of her.
I also know my Mom and how to her $10 is like $100 so hearing aids even $1,000 to her would seem astronomical in price. She'd retort, "I'm fine without them".
It's been a decades long battle someday she may give in.
I'm getting good results with MDHearingaid.com Air[0] over the past eight years. They work in reasonable environments, like the home, but aren't enough in a noisy, crowded room. Right now, they are $300 a pair, which is reasonable. Buy your mom a present for mother's day!
I had a Bose Hearphone, but it broke. It worked quite well - I think about as well as the high priced aids. Sadly, Bose discontinued it (why??) and I can't replace it. With four mics, it was able to cancel sounds from behind you. You only really heard the person you were facing.
Edit: I notice their dual-microphone Volts are selling for $300 a pair, also. I haven't tried them - but dual mic is what you need in noisy environments. Might be a really good deal.
Tinnitus is a subjective percept that arises from many, often independent, causes. Some of those causes involve hearing loss, hair cell death, hair cell deafferentiation. Some don't.
tinnitus is a known sideeffect of hearing loss, possibly due to changes in regulation of nerves making up for reduced signals. Another aspect is that often tinnitus and hearing loss are both effects of a "hörsturz"(there seems to be no easy to find translation in english, basically hörsturz is like a stroke inside the ear and results in severe tinnitus and/or hearing loss)
As one who is undergoing mapping of Cochlear Implant, I feel the need to put it out there some things about regrowing cilia hairs in cochlear.
If you had been subjected to a life-threatening high body temperature (106.5+ F, spinal meningitis), your cochlears would make for a poor candidate in benefitting from most form of treatment of cilia hair regrowth.
The problem is the fibrocyte nerve pathways (the ones embedded in the wall of the cochlear spiral) are basically heated to death through bursting/disintegration of its Mylar sheathings of its nerve cells in the cochlear pathway.
Although, not much research is done with regard to the temperature level in various part of the body notably inside the skull region during such an infection, it is arguable that cochlear is located in the hottest zone of the body given the locality of eustachian tube, inner ear and throat region being a harbor of Infectionous activity.
Not an expert here but a pretty serious consumer-based researcher of CI.
I lost one of my ears in a high fever episode when i was a child. I guess what you wrote means i shouldn't get my hopes up for these kind of treatments :(
The treatment is focused on regrowth of cilia hairs; what we, the high-temped folks, are really waiting for is a cochlear transplant or a regrowth of fibrocyte pathways within the cochlear wall (as well as this treatment).
I lost me left ear hearing capability when I was a child, never remember when, But don't know how. (I remember now that I had some fever) How did you know that your hearing loss was due to fever ?
I have sensoneural hearing loss, mostly in one ear, and the annoying thing about it is hearing aids don't really help much because of the distorted frequencies and non linear loss.
Before I had this I assumed wrongly that hearing loss could always be fixed by making sound louder. (It doesn't, just sounds like a voice disguiser or someone on Helium talking through a bad speaker.)
A non-linear loss should not be an issue for any modern hearing aid, they are designed specifically to deal with that. I've never seen an audiogram with a complete flat (linear) loss, I'm sure some have it but its not common.
I have a severe sensorineural loss in both ears and wears hearing aids with a lot of success. My loss was the result of some unknown illness when I was younger - a loss resulting from illness or drug reaction tend to present randomly across the frequencies, whereas an age-related loss is almost always a "ski slope" loss, which means the high frequencies are mostly lost and the lowers are mostly fine.
Your experience is very common with new hearing aid users. The aids are able to increase volume at specific frequencies as defined by your hearing test(s) and the other features of the aid, e.g. noise reduction and compression are able to give a great quality of sound. The problem is usually in the person's ability to comprehend these new sounds, i.e. their brain, not their ears. A person with a hearing loss typically takes seven years to try out hearing aids, in those years their brain has got used to not hearing certain frequencies and sounds altogether and it can take time and training to get that ability back.
There is not really a great set of tools for brain training part of the hearing problem at the moment, in my opinion its badly overlooked by the hearing industry.
I've had two bouts of SSNL, both in the right ear. The first only took my high end frequencies, so a hearing aid did work, but the second just about flatlined my hearing in that ear, so the hearing aid only gives the results you're referencing. I have a date for surgery to implant a bone-conducting hearing aid next month, it should hopefully restore hearing from that side. Definitely talk to your ENT about that option, the processor mounts magnetically (no cochlear implant style port in your head), so you can get away from the feeling of a hearing aid plugging up your ear!
Yes hearing aids tuning is a thing, often must be done repeatedly because of discomfort.
But the serious problem with hearing loss is the "bandwidth", meaning the damaged cells send less information to the brain even if attenuation is compensated by hearing aid, leading to bad recognition of sounds and speech.
With most new hearing aids users, multiple tunings are required as they cannot handle the new volume and intensity of sounds that hey haven't heard for years.
An audiologist will typically test someone, see that they need amplications across the range but send them away with a much lower amplification for a weeks to get used to things. Then bring the volume up as time goes by.
People amy also need to get used to the aid's noise reduction algorithms as they can seem unatural at first and is a nightmare for anyone who used to wear an old analog hearing aid with no noise reduction.
So, yeah, hearing aids are rarely plug-and-play from day one - the user needs time to adjust.
My hearing loss got to a point where tuning the hearing aid to the point where it sufficiently amplified sound for me to distinguish speech made it so loud that it sounded to my brain like a normal speaking volume, but it caused physical pain in my ear.
There are some interesting avenues of research for sensorineural hearing loss, such as the non-linearity- and distortion-inducing effects of some psychedelic tryptamines such as DiPT. Psychedelics tend to increase neuroplasticity, and these could do it specifically for aural processing.
A search of the comments shows 79 hits for tinnitus and zero for magnesium. If you suffer tinnitus, look into magnesium supplementation. Studies show people with tinnitus have low magnesium and anecdotal evidence suggests magnesium helps reduce symptoms.
I've got pretty bad - although not constant - tinnitus in my left ear after a particularly loud NYE too late in life.
What I find interesting though, is that I distinctly remember as a young kid living in the countryside that I found it impossible to hear absolute silence. I distinctly remember sitting on a bale of hay on a bright summer's day with not even a breeze and the quieter I perceived things, the louder a 'TV-like wheeee' noise (as I knew it at the time) became to fill the void. I always thought I had a special talent for being able to tell when a TV (CRT) was on anywhere in the hosue, as I could hear its high pitched whirr.
Now as an occasional sufferer of fairly bad tinnitus, I often wonder what any of the above means, as there's surely something in it.
Only coping strategy I have is to not fixate on it, whereupon it dies down. That's tricky those times it crops up at nighttime and I'm staring at the ceiling at 4am trying desperately to get back to sleep... .
I had the same experience when visiting an anechoic chamber. I think the explanation is that without external stimuli, your brain cranks up the input gain to the max, at which point you begin to hear the ambient "neural noise" from your auditory circuitry. People taking DMT or ayahuasca also often experience an extremely high-pitched sound as the drug kicks in, which also suggests a neurological basis for the phenomenon.
Another way to do this, that might be less stressful or painful, is to just spend a week out in nature.
We go four week long Outdoor Adventures, where nothing works except for AM radio late at night.
After a few days, hearing very significantly improves. On the last trip we took a Macbook, and watch the movie about 4 days in, and we're shocked at just how great that laptop sounded! It seems very loud and amazing, where in an ordinary City environment it's just normal acceptable sound.
Any of you that get a chance to try this really should, it's dramatic. And it makes me really appreciate the audio engineering that went into those devices. A lot of that engineering won't ever be heard by people for in urban environments, but it is there, the work was done, and the results are pretty fantastic.
I never got the 'nee-naw nee-naws' from DMT or Ayahuasca when I did such things, but I absolutely did when going deep on Nitrous Oxide. DMT was always entirely (and oh my gosh so absolutely) visual for me.
I'm the same. I'm literally cathartic that someone had this same experience. I never, ever heard complete silence - there was always this whirr.
I'm a musician so it's easy for everybody to dismiss my problems, but I remember exactly the same things. I always knew if someone turned the TV on. I always heard the TV noise even when it was off. There's also some certain upper-mid frequencies which completely destroy my sanity - bad PA systems and wall reflections are particular banes of my existence.
I've always asked myself - how could I get this if I always had good hearing? Is this even anyone's fault? How could a child have tinnitus when it had no real chance to get it?
This entire post+comments has me almost in tears - my tinnitus gets unbearable e.g. when I'm stressed, panicking or overstimulated. It helps to know someone shares my pain, even if this treatment won't become available in my lifetime. I'm used to having stuff playing in the background anyway, it's just the times when I can't drown it out when it's the worst.
PS: BTW, something interesting happened to me recently: I recently visited a retro game museum while on vacation. Being obviously filled with old TVs, the noise was nigh-insufferable for me, but I pushed through because retro games is my thing. We spent ~1hr there and after we left, I felt like my own TV noise was somehow better for the day. Weird.
Wow, I thought I was the only one with the TV thing! I remember it as young as 4-5, but no one knew what I was talking about. I’ve had constant minor tinnitus since then, so I can’t help but feeling like there’s a CRT near my head that has been running since the early nineties.
I also could hear CRT when on (probably high voltage PSU) as a kid. Recently, I thought my tinnitus got worse until I found that one of my smart power supplies started making high pitch sound (ceramic capacitors in power supplies cause it).
O that's interesting. I was able to do the same (tv, refrigerator, etc). I also lived country side and I have hearing loss (35db) and tinnitus (sometimes? moderate?) in my left ear, but seemingly due to a virus infection.
I have never encountered someone else that was able to hear whether a tv was on or not. At what distance could you do that?
I can hear whether they were on or off, and whether they were tuned to a signal or not.
A video signal synchronized up has a very distinct profile, and people who can hear about 15 khz can hear the sync signals modulating the higher frequency component.
I could at one point, adjust horizontal and vertical hold to a stable signal eyes closed.
Some sets were very loud, and I could hear them rooms away. Walking The Halls in my primary school, I could walk by the classrooms and say they have a TV on oh, and nail it a hundred percent every time.
At least within the house - we moved around a lot, but I lived in a few three storey stonework houses, and could generally tell from 'the other end' of the house if the TV was on.
I don't recall hearing the same noise from fridges though!
Wait hold up, you mean that's not normal? Hearing a high pitch noise all the time I mean. I thought it was like when you're in full darkness and you "see" shapes because your brain is trying to interpret the subtle residual signals on neurons lacking direct stimulation.
Apparently not. It's a long-time since, but I remember adults largely couldn't hear it (not too surprising) but I had friends my age who hadn't a clue what I was on about either - a sentiment shared by at least one other neighbouring commenter.
I've always heard ringing at very high frequencies; 17-20kHz when it's quiet. Can't remember ever not hearing this. Sometimes the ringing has pulsating increases in loudness synchronized with my heartbeat. Also have a little bit of tinnitus on both ears, different frequencies.
Never really considered the high-frequency experience a problem; it's just always been part of my sensory experience.
I'm in the rare category here, but I've got around 50% hearing loss and I love it. I can't hear alarms, or dogs, or radios etc. It's fantastic for living in the city. I've tried a hearing aid and it's like... "this is awful". I just put one in for tv or the theater or parties and that's about it.
I foresee this being wicked cool in combination with current cochlear implant (CI) technology which is already quite mature (30-40+ years). Not a scientist, but something makes me think CI's could at least leap-frog or fill in the gaps of this therapy while it's in a less mature state.
I've seen news related to this FX-322 drug, but it's never clear to me if this works or not, or if it will be available to the public somehow.
I lost my hi-freq in one ear due to inflammation if the cochlea (vestibular neuritis). Would love to know if this could help grow those hair cells back.
That also gave me tinitus, but I don't really care about tinitus, I just want to get those frequencies back.
I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).
Can people please stop posting this in every tinnitus thread? It’s an actual trigger that makes tinnitus worse for others. There’s nothing useful brought upon by falsely correlating suicidal and tinnitus, and in fact it creates some major negative externalities by making folks have massive tinnitus flare ups or even trigger suicidal ideation.
Tinnitus is mentionned in the first paragraph of the article. Talking about the suicide rate is usually a simple way to get people who know nothing of the condition to understand how serious it is, most people imagine the faint temporary noise that happens after listening to a loud movie but it's much more worst than that.
I grant you, some people who use "trigger warnings" would have added one before talking about suicide rates. I however do not use them outside mental health forums and such.
But you can certainly learn to ignore it. After one particularly loud concert, my ears started to ring, and they have never really stopped. I was depressed, disappointed, and angry with myself for not having taken better care of my ears. But you know what? After 6 months to a year, I habituated to it. I notice the ringing on a super quiet morning in the countryside when there aren't any other sounds, but other than that, it doesn't bother me. I can still listen to music; in fact, that helps mask out the ringing.
If you have severe tinnitus, look at getting hearing aids -- they fill back the affected frequencies so your brain doesn't crank up the gain and fill them with the phantom sound. Or look at Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. But most people do habituate to it. What you read online on the tinnitus forums and so forth has selection bias. People post on the forums how terrible things are right after they develop tinnitus, but after they habituate to it, they don't post as much about that.
While you can habituate to it and will after several years, it's still a ghastly condition that can come back and negatively impact you. Personally, I have it since birth and have never experienced silence. Most of the time, I cannot hear it but it's always there lurking behind a thin veil of distractions.
I recently caught the covid virus. The symptoms were bad but far from what annoyed me the most from it. The worst is how since I have had it, my tinnitus is back to the forefront of my life and louder than ever. Many people who have managed to ignore their tinnitus will have it come back when they are exhausted, tired, sick, stressed, etc.
Being dismissive and saying you can learn to ignore it is not really helpful, this is true of most conditions. This article however offers a tangible cure.
Not to be dismissive either but the ringing from hearing music that is too loud is the mildest case most commone case of tinnitus that exists and will often simply reduce by a large margin on its own. Chronic tinnitus is defined as a tinnitus that lasts more than six months.
In my case, it's at the level of a lawnmower behind a thin wall when at it's worst and mosquito near the ear when at it's mildest. In some other cases, it's car engine and even jet engine level. To me your message (while probably not on purpose) comes across like someone with an amputated finger talking to someone with two amputated legs about how you can learn to live with it (especially with the talk about selection bias, which is useful when looking at trends but not when talking to individuals). Yes you can control it and yes it's the same medical condition. But it's not the same beast.
"Certainly" is a wild stretch. That may be true for mild cases, but then there are people out there where the Tinnitus sound is louder than 100 decibel. One cannot learn to ignore that, especially not when it is permanent.
9% of women with tinnitus attempt suicide, or 9% of women that attempt suicide have tinnitus?
I find it curious since I've had tinnitus since I was very young and it isn't life wrecking - but maybe that's because it is just part of my default life experience.
It’s funny to me seeing everyone in this thread acting like tinnitus is the worst shit ever and they’re suffering everyday. Look up Meniere’s disease. It can be so much worse.
And yes, I understand that suffering is relative and that there are worse things than Meniere’s disease, thank you.
It's not a race. I have conditions that are considered worst than tinnitus.
Having a lawnmower in my head at all time is not the end of the world. But it's certainly exhausting and sometimes disabilitating.
It's meaningless to compare health conditions. What's the worst between something that kills you, something that paralyzes you, something that gives you constant pain and something that triggers constant fear in you?
All of them. All of them are the worst to people who suffers from them.
Tinnitus is brought up in the article, this is why people are talking about it. Not because it's a condition that is worst than others.
Reading about a possible cure is one of the are form of hope someone with tinnitus will ever have.
I’ve been afflicted with tinnitus after a mild covid case in January and now that I’m looking it seems like this is a growing problem. So many comments here about tinnitus.
I am in the same boat. In my case, I think Covid affected the microcirculation in my ear. I've been having success in addressing it through therapies to promote blood flow and endothelial repair.
I read this shortly after I got tinnitus and it did not help my mental health. I immediately wished I never saw it. I would probably delete this, it’s not out of line but it might save somebody a lot of negative thoughts and fear.
I have been seeing a lot of news articles from university websites on HN recently.
Do people realize that they essentially function as hype-generation outlets and are not intended to provide an objective and unbiased assessment of the research?
It's a press release, most people with some amount of media literacy understand what they are.
And really, the original press releases tend to be quite a bit better than the 'science blog' articles that regurgitate them, coming from a university url isn't a bad thing.
I think most here are interested in hearing about what cool new research is being performed at the top universities regardless if the article itself includes the conclusions of the studies + peer review.
I wonder if this will treat hidden hearing loss at all.
I check all the boxes for tinnitus behavior (loud blasting music hours a day for years) but only have mild tinnitus at worst. I do however have hidden hearing loss, where I absolutely cannot understand what people are saying if there is too much ambient noise. Bars are hopeless situations for conversation, even a fan on in a room can make conversing difficult. It would be nice to revert this (and secretly go back to occasionally blasting music so loud your organs feel it).
AFAIK hidden hearing loss is due to synaptopathy (see Liberman's work). This work helps regrow hair cells, though.
Does your Pure Tone Audiometry show any losses at all on your audiogram? It would be surprising that such an auditory insult had no damaging effect on your hair cells, so you may still benefit from this if it works.
We recently learned that my daughter is completely deaf in one ear. She is a very happy healthy girl otherwise, but it makes me sad to know that currently we have no therapy and she could live her whole life like this. But maybe there will be something for her in a few years.
Hey there - speaking as somebody who was born profoundly deaf but has been hearing 30+ years later thanks to the use of a cochlear implant (CI) and auditory-verbal training, and almost always at the point that people off the street don't realize that I have it ... there's options out there, she doesn't have to live with that constraint. Would highly encourage you to look into the technology there at bare minimum. (The earlier that people have the training/implant, the more exceptional results tend to happen, given there's less delay in speech.)
Happy to share my story and some resources - my email's in the profile. Best of luck to you and your family, and I feel for you.
Thank you so much! I am very interested in CI. Currently we're waiting for our appointments with the ENT but I hear so much good about it, I'm hoping we can move this forward as soon as possible. I will definitely be in touch.
I lost my hearing in one ear 9 years ago when I was 15 as the result of an illness. I could get a CI but choose not to. Honestly, being deaf in one ear has barely affected me. There are some situations (if it is a loud environment and the person is on my left) where I struggle to hear people and I cannot tell the direction sound is coming from but I do not find this has a major impact on my life.
Personally I am concerned that a CI would not improve my quality of life and may even make it worse. My understanding is that the hearing from a cochlear implant is not the same as "normal" hearing so I worry it may effect my current experience in a negative way.
Speak to the doctor but I would personally be a bit cautious about it, especially if your daughter is not at an age where she can properly communicate her experience of hearing with you.
I'm also essentially deaf (90% loss) in my right ear. It really doesn't affect my life in a negative way except in situations like you mentioned. Also, wearing a one-eared headset offers no advantages over a two-eared set in an office environment. I won't be hearing what the person in my cubicle says either way until I remove it.
If you ever encounter a person who instead of making eye contact seems to be looking just over your shoulder, it could be you are about to be attacked or it could be someone like me who needs to turn their one good ear towards you slightly in order to hear our conversation. :)
Hey, I completely lost my hearing in one ear about five years ago. I'm sorry to hear about your daughter. But I'd encourage you not to be too worried about it.
Personally, I only notice it in very loud situations in which someone is speaking to me on my deaf side; otherwise the sound bounces around and reaches my working ear anyway. I don't feel "disabled" in any way. In fact I rarely think about it. I've been given a hearing aid, but I don't bother with it, frankly I just don't need it. The body is quite amazing at adapting.
I'll keep this in mind. I've heard some scary things about falling behind in school and having difficulty in noisy social situations... but it sounds like there's a lot of variation in how well people cope, and she's coping extremely well so far.
Same here though mine was probably due to an undiagnosed ear infection as an infant.
One weird instance happened about 25 years ago. I suffered a severe blow to the back of my head. My hearing in my bad ear actually came back for a while but it was like listening to a poorly tuned radio. Proper volume but full of static. After a week or so, my hearing returned back to its normal deficient state. No idea what exactly happened or why.
Oh man I hope this becomes a treatment in the next couple of years. I wonder if it’ll help treat my tinnitus too. I will pay to reduce my tinnitus , and restoring hearing would be an added bonus.
You might be referring to a quote from Paul Stamets. I am not an expert, so here's my anecdotal take on it: when I drink alcohol, my mild tinitus completely fades away. I'm highly suspecting it has something to do with lowering blood pressure. Psylocybine is also known to affect blood pressure, (both rising and lowering). Then again, so is trying to relax. Being a micro doser myself, I have become very sceptical about the psylocybine craze lately. It's being advocated as a panacea, which it's obviously not. I know you are referring to an anecdote, but it's not far off from what I've seen being pushed by these so called 'institutions' without any substantial evidence. The quackery going on is pretty worrysome and will end up damaging the image of psylocybine yet again, imho.
Let's talk about money. How much is a reasonable total cost like this for restoration of hearing? $10k? $100k? $1 million? More? Next, what do readers think the cost will actually be?
They haven't really gotten to the point where they even know it works.
The mechanism should work if there are viable progenitor cells present (so I would expect it to be of some use in most cases of hearing loss), but they may not be able to develop this drug into a reliable treatment.
So true. My son was born with severe hearing loss, and for 5 years we have heard treatment was on the horizon.
His hearing has now declined to the point where he needs a cochlear implant, and I worry that if we do that and a treatment is eventually developed, he might not benefit from it. However, I think it would be foolish to wait. Gene therapy seems like the only hope, and I don't think there have been great developments in that area.
The failure of the prior trial was suspected, and I believe it, due to a refractory response by overdosing the inner ear with too frequent administrations of the drug, and then testing for effect too soon. I bet even those candidates of the phase IIa trial though would, if checked on now, show some improvement.
Animal research has shown that natural cochlear hair cell regeneration and resultant hearing restoration is very real, we mammals just don't have the natural cellular signaling to redifferentiate those base cells - small molecule drugs like FX322 do exactly that. I am optimistic they'll eventually find the right dosing regimen to see reliable and optimal clinical effect, and it will be a seismic advance in medicine.