Recent work undertaken by the Hearing and Balance Centre in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine has shown a link between inflammation biology and age-related hearing loss. We are currently taking this work further in two directions.
In the first, we are seeking to understand the link between inflammation, cochlear status and cochlear implant outcomes, particularly preservation of residual hearing after implantation but also more general outcomes after cochlear implantation. We hypothesise that inflammation plays a significant role in determining cochlear health, which in turn predicts outcomes after cochlear implantation, both because hearing preservation is increasingly important in determining outcomes and because recent work by Bryan Pfingst has shown that cochlear health preservation is important for implant success. The second direction of this topic is to extend the work already undertaken in the area of age-related hearing loss, via both animal and human studies, in collaboration with the Neuroscience group in the Faculty of Medicine.
PhD students: Andrew Causon
Total funding to date: £67,000