Hair cell counts in a rat model of sound damage: Effects of tissue preparation & identification of regions of hair cell loss.

In this study we quantify changes in HC number following exposure to one of four sound damage paradigms. We exposed adult, anesthetized Sprague Dawley rats to a unilateral 16 kHz pure tone that varied in intensity (114 dB or 118 dB) and duration (1, 2, or 4 h) and sacrificed animals 2-4 weeks later. We compared two different methods of tissue preparation, plastic embedding/sectioning and whole mount dissection, for quantifying hair cell loss as a function of frequency We found that the two methods of tissue preparation produced largely comparable cochleograms, with whole mount dissections allowing a more rapid evaluation of hair cell number. Both inner and outer hair cell loss was observed throughout the length of the cochlea irrespective of sound damage paradigm. IHC loss was either equal to or greater than OHC loss. Increasing the duration of sound exposures resulted in more severe HC loss which included all HC lesions observed in an analogous shorter duration exposure. PMID: 26299845 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Hearing Research - Category: Audiology Authors: Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research