January 15th, 2005
Research Into Age-Related Hearing Loss
News-Medical.Net reports that "researchers have discovered that deletion of a specific gene permits the proliferation of new hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear -- a finding that offers promise for treatment of age-related hearing loss." General advances in capabilities of research are allowing all sorts of potential therapies and cures for specific degenerative effects of aging to appear on the horizon. This can only be a good thing. "A major obstacle to hair-cell research has been that, since there are not very many hair cells in the inner ear, it has been hard to get enough material for study. But with Zheng-Yi's work, we now have the potential for generating cultured lines of hair cells for experiments."