How Will Future Therapies Display Inner Ear Wounds?

[cornelius]

I haven't found any information about the way future regenerative medicine could target what is hurt and not target what is healthy in order to make tailored therapies without targeting what doesn't need beeing cured. Imagine two different patients suffering from tinnitus associated or not with hearing loss, one has hair cell wounds but no neural damage, the other has healthy hair cells with neural damage. Is it an area focused as well as current inner ear delivery tests which are more - i believe - involved in hearing threshold and tinnitus discomfort evaluation between before and after ear injections ? Because normally when a cure or an operation is launched, one needs to know what is exactly hurt.

(Edit : Sorry administrators I wrote in the wrong section, is it possible to shift it on the research section, unless it's even so appropriate here, thank you.)

 

[Aaron123]

There is work on imaging techniques to view the inner ear at the cellular level in order to understand what is damaged. See, for example,

http://biomedicaloptics.spiedigitallibrary.org/article.aspx?articleid=1392727
http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1691511

Additionally, at least one attempt is underway to design an endoscope for inner ear imaging

http://www.researchposters.com/Posters/COSM/COSM2015/F010.pdf

If they can get this worked out, it will be a big step forward to be able to correlate hearing tests and patient reports with imaging of the inner ear and to attempt to develop hearing tests that can distinguish inner ear damage.

 

[bill 112]

This is a major step and a must needed one if they truly want to see the condition of ones inner ear.

 

[Sailboardman]

If you can live until 2050, you might get relief? All these possibilities, are light years away. Get used to the noise, it isn't going anywhere soon.

 

[bill 112]

If you can live until 2050, you might get relief? All these possibilities, are light years away. Get used to the noise, it isn't going anywhere soon.

Don't be so sure,only thing that gets me through the day is the hope and thoughts that a breakthrough may come today,tomorrow or 10 years from now.It could happen at anytime and that's the way I like to look at it

 

[Path Maker]

There is ALWAYS the possibility of more effective treatments, solutions, approaches coming. It's best to live the best we can for today AND to keep that flame of positivity burning too. I'd rather live like that than the opposite.

 

[cornelius]

Thank you for the links. I fear too it won't be useful before 2050 but I ramble cynically that widespread development might come faster if teenagers and seniors give us a little help by rising even more the volume for the ones and developing hearing loss induced dementia for the others. Prevention doesn't work, epidemiological studies for future announce major and widespread ear damages, like syphilis in the last century, when something becomes widespread, a cure - along with the tools that allow to explore the body in order to make a right diagnosis - is eventually tailored.