Health
THE antiviral medication Tamiflu seems to ease noise-induced hearing loss in mice. If the same thing happens in people, this could open the door to a treatment for a common type of deafness.
Noise-related hearing loss affects approximately 5 per cent of people worldwide. Prevention focuses on just avoiding loud sounds where possible, and treatments are limited to hearing aids and implants. Only one drug, sodium thiosulphate, has ever been approved to prevent any type of hearing loss. It was given the green light by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022, but it is only available for children taking a form of chemotherapy called cisplatin, which can damage the ear by inducing cell death.
Drug library
Seeking more options, Emma Sailor Longsworth at Creighton University in Nebraska and her colleagues have worked their way through a library of 1300 drugs that had been FDA approved to protect against cisplatin damage to any part of the body.
The researchers tested whether any of these drugs shielded inner ear cells from harm in test tube experiments, which led them to oseltamivir phosphate, which is better known as Tamiflu.
To assess whether oseltamivir phosphate might treat noise-induced hearing loss, the team placed mice into a sound-tight chamber and exposed them to 100 decibels of noise – equivalent to the sound of a relatively quiet bulldozer or motorcycle – over 2 hours.
The mice were then split into four groups, three of which received varying doses of oseltamivir phosphate within 24 hours of noise exposure, while the fourth group acted as a control.
Compared with the control group, the mice that received the highest dose of the drug had less diminishing of their auditory brainstem response, defined as the activity level of a pathway of neurons that connects the inner ear to the brain’s major hearing hub, called the inferior colliculus. Lower doses were less effective.
Through a series of further experiments, the researchers found that
