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Old October 29, 2011, 12:22 PM   #64
Glenn E. Meyer
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Join Date: November 17, 2000
Posts: 20,064
Anybody post this:

http://www.stripes.com/news/despite-...roops-1.145733

Anyway - doing a touch of medical lit searching and there is little out there to recover lost hair cells. Cell replacement and gene therapies are very far away.

The issues are stopping the tinnitis and then repairing damage. Both are a neurological bear.

I worked for a bit on a team doing similar research on retinal damage. Monkey fetal cells, human fetal cells, stem cells, etc. I did behaviorial testing. It's a monster to crack.

There are all kinds of problems. For example, let's say you have been suffering from such damage for a long time and we do come up with some way to regrow hair cells. Guess what - the parts of the auditory cortex that used to connect may have lost the ability to process sound. That depends on a bunch of things.

Maybe we can't replace the receptor space for human speech.

Taking off my gun hat and putting on my work hat and reading about visual protheses problems indicates that auditory ones have similar complexities.

Bottom line - use hearing protection.

The analogy - would you not use eye protection to acclimate yourself to getting hit in the orbs by some blast or flying crap?

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