Uncovering Hidden Hearing Loss

The UHEAL project is a collaborative synergy project supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation with the aim to understand, describe, and diagnose hidden hearing loss in human patients.

Exposure to loud sounds has been shown to produce a damage to auditory nerve fibers that can go undetected in standard audiometric hearing tests. Although audiometric thresholds may be unrevealing, neuropathic damage is suspected to cause problems with listening in daily life noisy environments. Hidden hearing loss is a progressive condition that may affect even young listeners, but its nature and extent in human patients are unknown.

Today, our primary knowledge of this disorder comes from cellular physiology and evidence of cochlear neuropathy in humans is missing. The goal of the UHEAL synergy project is to tackle this challenge by combining cellular physiology of the ear with clinical audiology and non-invasive MR imaging. The project combines expertise within these different fields with the goal to develop MRI-based imaging techniques to detect auditory nerve damages, to investigate the consequences of these damages in auditory brain processing and behavior, and to evaluate measures for diagnosis of cochlear neuropathy in humans.