This lecture is one of the 2023 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Research Seminar series.

Speaker

Aravind Parthasarathy, PhD

Assistant Professor of Communication Science and Disorders, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences; of Bioengineering, Swanson School of Engineering; and of Otolaryngology, School of Medicine

Topic

A Cross-Species Approach to Understanding the Physiological Mechanisms Underlying Age-Related Hearing Loss

Registration for the lecture is required to receive event instructions.

Topic Overview

Age-related hearing loss, defined as declines in the hearing thresholds, affects approximately 45 million adults over the age of 50 in the United States alone. Untreated hearing loss decreases quality of life and has also been associated with other age-related comorbidities, like cognitive impairment. However, assessing hearing thresholds alone fails to capture critical aspects of real-world hearing difficulties. At the auditory periphery, in addition to sensory loss that typically affects thresholds, there is a progressive loss of synapses between the inner hair cells and the auditory nerve that is undetected by threshold assessments, earning it the moniker of “hidden” hearing loss. In the central auditory pathway, peripheral deafferentation is accompanied by compensatory changes to various neural circuits. Thus, age-related hearing loss reflects a complex mixture of degeneration and neural compensation from cochlea to cortex, which affects aging listeners, who experience problems hearing in complex listening environments.

Parthasarathy’s talk will focus on studies aimed at diagnosing hidden hearing loss and understanding the central consequences of hidden hearing loss on neural coding of sounds. He will also discuss the effects of cochlear synapse loss on speech understanding using a closed-loop translational approach that combines studies in rodent models of hearing loss and human clinical populations. Using noninvasive, auditory-evoked potentials as the translational bridge, the Parthasarathy lab studies the functional aspects of age-related hearing loss with the goal of designing the next generation of objective neurophysiological biomarkers for assessing changes in hearing in the clinic.