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Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

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21–30 of 215 posts

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#21

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.

Thanks for the recommendation, will look it up. I have friends who suffer from tinnitus and I hope it can help them.

https://www.hear-it.org/Tinnitus-Retraining-Therapy

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#22

> Hair cells die off when exposed to loud noises or drugs including certain chemotherapies and antibiotics. Does this mean this treatment works only for these conditions, and not common aging-related loss?

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.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#23
post #3

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.) This looks promising.

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!

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#24
post #4

Disclosure: I own FREQ stock. 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 re…

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.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#25
post #6

Does anyone know if this can finally be a treatment for tinnitus? I would love to hear silence again.

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... .

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#26
post #3

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.) This looks promising.

My understanding of hearing aids is not that it makes sounds louder across the entire spectrum, but only selective frequencies? An audiologist should be able to tune your hearing aids to amplify only those frequencies that need amplification. (Although my understanding is that this is fairly new, and may not be available around the world)

Yes I have tuned hearing aids and unfortunately my SNHL still struggles with speech perception.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#27
post #3

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.) This looks promising.

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 optio…

Thanks, I thought bone conducting still depended on the damaged hairs in ear for transferring to nerves though?

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#29
post #3

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.) This looks promising.

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.

This is a very interesting book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262045869

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#30
post #3

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.) This looks promising.

My understanding of hearing aids is not that it makes sounds louder across the entire spectrum, but only selective frequencies? An audiologist should be able to tune your hearing aids to amplify only those frequencies that need amplification. (Although my understanding is that this is fairly new, and may not be available around the world)

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.

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