I took audio engineering while in high school. There, I learned everything about mixing and sound in general. One thing we focused on was noise induced hearing loss. I was astonished to learn about tinnitus and learn the statistics about noise induced hearing loss. According to an article by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, or NIDCD “Approximately 15 percent of Americans a between the ages of 20 and 69—or 26 million Americans—have hearing loss that may have been caused by exposure to noise at work or in leisure activities.” This is a HUGE number of people especially when it is something that can be prevented.

In a second article I found, this one done by American Hearing Research Foundation, it said that hearing loss could absolutely not be fixed. This is the same as what I learned in class, that once it’s gone, there is no getting it back again. This has been the belief for several years but as I continued my search, I stumbled across a third article, a recent one, in which they could prove the previous beliefs wrong.

Medical News Today published an article about noise-induced hearing loss was restored in mice. Researchers from the University of Michigan and students at Harvard Medical School conducted experiments on mice that could be revolutionary. They increased the protein that is abbreviated as NT3 in the mice with the noise induced hearing loss and were able to see positive results. They found that NT3 is a large part of the communication between the ear and the brain the researchers created an experimental experiment in order to test the differences in the mice. With this they looked at the group of mice that got a boost in the NT3 protein and those who did not. They found that the ones that had the boosted “NT3 regained their hearing in a 3 week period.”

Although these findings are extraordinary, they cannot jump to conclusions about the effects it has on human hearing. The scientists want to see if there would be methods to create a drug that would help with the increase in NT3 of humans and would help regain hearing. They also mention in the article how the researchers only used partially deaf mice so they are uncertain to whether or not it would help fully deaf mice.

Overall, I think it would be really interesting to see where this research can lead to humans. I also would like to follow up and see if they do tests on fully deaf mice because that as well could open doors to the future of reversing the effect of noise-induced hearing loss. I thought this experiment was conducted well in the way that they compared the two groups and I think they should use this type of experiment on humans too (as long as they know NT3 would not be a negative effect).