News Brief by Sam Kessel
A team led
by the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine (USC) has
recently begun a clinical trial to assist children born without an auditory
nerve. Despite the availability of hearing aids, people born without this nerve are never able to hear because their brain is unable to process sound. An Auditory
Brainstem Implant (ABI) is a device that directly stimulates neurons at the position where the spinal cord meets the brain. The device has been
successfully used in the past to treat children 12 years or older suffering
from neurofibromatosis type II, a disease that produces a harmless brain tumor
on the hearing nerve. Typically, this treatment has not been successful in
adults because after a certain age, brains are unable to learn how to process
sound. This clinical trial is important because it is the first of its kind to
effectively test how well the ABI improves outcomes for young children and
determine how safe it is. Additionally, this trial will help scientists to
study how the brain physically changes
when it begins processing sound and learns speech.
University of Southern California - Health Sciences. "Auditory brainstem implant: Hearing experts break sound barrier for children born without hearing nerve." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 February 2015. .
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