In-home Care in Los Angeles: New Hearing Loss Research
Exciting Ear Research for In-home Care in Los Angeles
If you have a loved one over age 63, there is a one in three chance that they don’t hear as well as they used to. If you think about it, you’ve probably become accustomed to assuming that elderly people have suffered hearing loss: you automatically sit closer and speak more loudly to seniors. Experts with in-home care in Los Angeles have always wondered when science would send hearing loss the way of polio and smallpox, and new research might be an important step in that direction.
Protecting and Repairing Mechanisms
Hearing loss occurs when the tiny vibration-sensitive hairs of your ear, and the nerves to which they are connected, become damaged. This might happen because of overstimulation—that is, the excessive loudness of a rock concert or war zone—or simply through many years of normal use. With the development of gene therapy, scientists are now pursuing the idea of manipulating those hairs and nerves directly to give them greater resistance to damage. In a recent report, some of these scientists state that they have been able to stave off hearing loss in mice that would have otherwise developed it.
The Next Steps
Obviously, positive results in rodent studies are a different story from treating humans successfully. We don’t know yet if humans would suffer dangerous side effects from this kind of treatment, or how expensive and difficult it would be to alter human genes in the same way. As with so many exciting health developments on the horizon, we can only wait and see how this one progresses.
Listening to Eldercare in Los Angeles
Lest we become discouraged about the long road to gene therapy solutions for hearing loss, take a look at what we already have access to. Thanks to hearing aids, family members and eldercare in Los Angeles no longer have to shout themselves hoarse just to make themselves understood to seniors. People with only minor hearing loss can enjoy practically normal hearing with the help of these amazing devices, which just a few decades ago were a science-fiction fantasy.
Categorised in: Healthcare, Healthy Elders