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Hair cell counts in a rat model of sound damage: Effects of tissue preparation & identification of regions of hair cell loss. Hear Res 2015 Oct;328:120-32

Date

08/25/2015

Pubmed ID

26299845

Pubmed Central ID

PMC4646081

DOI

10.1016/j.heares.2015.08.008

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-84942827448 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   12 Citations

Abstract

Exposure to intense sound can damage or kill cochlear hair cells (HC). This loss of input typically manifests as noise induced hearing loss, but it can also be involved in the initiation of other auditory disorders such as tinnitus or hyperacusis. In this study we quantify changes in HC number following exposure to one of four sound damage paradigms. We exposed adult, anesthetized Long-Evans rats to a unilateral 16 kHz pure tone that varied in intensity (114 dB or 118 dB) and duration (1, 2, or 4 h) and sacrificed animals 2-4 weeks later. We compared two different methods of tissue preparation, plastic embedding/sectioning and whole mount dissection, for quantifying hair cell loss as a function of frequency. We found that the two methods of tissue preparation produced largely comparable cochleograms, with whole mount dissections allowing a more rapid evaluation of hair cell number. Both inner and outer hair cell loss was observed throughout the length of the cochlea irrespective of sound damage paradigm. Inner HC loss was either equal to or greater than outer HC loss. Increasing the duration of sound exposures resulted in more severe HC loss, which included all HC lesions observed in an analogous shorter duration exposure.

Author List

Neal C, Kennon-McGill S, Freemyer A, Shum A, Staecker H, Durham D

Author

Axel Shum MD Adjunct Instructor in the Otolaryngology department at Medical College of Wisconsin




MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Animals
Auditory Threshold
Cochlea
Hair Cells, Auditory
Hair Cells, Auditory, Inner
Hair Cells, Auditory, Outer
Hearing Loss, Noise-Induced
Male
Noise
Plastics
Rats
Rats, Long-Evans
Reproducibility of Results
Sound
Tissue Preservation