According to the new research Massachusetts Eye and Ear published in Nature Communications proves that the short-term hearing loss during childhood can lead to regular hearing deficits, even after when basic auditory sensitivity has returned to normal.

The team made a deep study by inducing a brief, reversible hearing loss at the key milestones during the cortical development. After that they identified two critical time periods occurring after hearing onset that regulates the maturation of coordinated binaural sound representation. They found out that this childhood problem could reoccur as this the development of sound processing develops at small age only.

The co-author and also Hearing scientist Daniel Polley, Ph.D., from Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School’s Eaton-Peabody Laboratories of Auditory Physiology explains, “These findings demonstrate that brief bouts of asymmetric hearing loss during very specific points in postnatal development can have a lasting effect on brain circuits that compare and integrate the sound waves that enter each ear.”

 

By: Martin Gibbons, tele-management.ca