ABSTRACT
Millions of people of all ages suffer from sensorineural hearing loss. The majority of sensorineural disorders involve progressive sensorineural cochlear pathology, most notably in the basal end of the cochlea and resulting in loss of high-frequency hearing (Dublin, 1976; Northern and Downs, 1991; Schuknecht, 1974; Willott, 1991). At this time, little if anything can be done to effectively slow or ameliorate the progression of sensorineural cochlear degeneration. Similarly, little can be done to improve “central” correlates of sensorineural hearing loss, a collection of problems including difficulty hearing speech and other stimuli in acoustically degraded or noisy conditions (Schuknecht, 1974; Willott, 1991a). Recent studies have investigated a simple yet intriguing phenomenon that holds promise as a means of altering the severity and time course of progressive sensorineural hearing loss: exposure to augmented levels of controlled acoustic stimulation, an
augmented acoustic environment
(AAE) (Turner and Willott, 1998). The essential notion is that appropriate stimulation of the degenerating cochlea and the central auditory system by an appropriate AAE may have ameliorative effects, similar to the effects of “exercise” or increased neural activity in other neural systems (e.g., Cotman and Neeper, 1996).
