Publications by authors named "G M Klump"
Article Synopsis
- Age-related hearing loss, or presbycusis, is a complex condition affecting many older adults and involving various mechanisms, particularly metabolic dysfunction in the stria vascularis essential for hearing.
- Research has shifted focus back to the stria vascularis, highlighting its role in age-related hearing loss and examining factors like ion transport changes, pigmentation shifts, and inflammation.
- This review emphasizes the need for a comprehensive understanding of metabolic and sensorineural mechanisms in age-related hearing loss to inform future research and potential treatment strategies.
In mammalian hearing, type-I afferent auditory nerve fibers comprise the basis of the afferent auditory pathway. They are connected to inner hair cells of the cochlea via specialized ribbon synapses. Auditory nerve fibers of different physiological types differ subtly in their synaptic location and morphology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPure-tone audiograms often poorly predict elderly humans' ability to communicate in everyday complex acoustic scenes. Binaural processing is crucial for discriminating sound sources in such complex acoustic scenes. The compromised perception of communication signals presented above hearing threshold has been linked to both peripheral and central age-related changes in the auditory system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study investigates how aging affects the ability to understand speech in noisy environments using quiet-aged gerbils as a model.
- Behavioral vowel discrimination tests showed that while older gerbils performed similarly overall to younger ones, specific vowel pairs were harder to distinguish, indicating some difficulty in processing.
- Interestingly, older gerbils exhibited enhanced temporal coding of vowels despite typically lower sensitivity, suggesting different underlying mechanisms of speech perception as age increases.
Article Synopsis
- Older adults often face challenges in processing sounds and understanding speech in noisy environments, even when hearing tests appear normal.
- Studies indicate that cognitive decline and potential cochlear issues might contribute to these problems, but this research introduces a new idea: reduced inhibition in the auditory system could be the main factor.
- In a study of adults aged 25-59 with normal hearing and cognitive function, it was found that as age increased, auditory performance decreased, and this decline correlated more closely with reduced inhibition scores than with suspected cochlear damage.