PRESAGE: Precision audiology for age-related hearing loss
PRESAGE: Precision audiology for age-related hearing loss
Project description
Age-related hearing loss is one of the most common diseases in old age and can severely impair quality of life. The PRESAGE project is investigating the causes of this hearing loss by combining genetic information with detailed audiological measurements. For this purpose, test subjects with premature age-related hearing loss and control subjects were comprehensively analysed.
The audiological characterisation includes various examinations of hearing and balance function. These include psychoacoustic tests (suprathreshold measurements such as speech intelligibility, loudness scaling and intensity discrimination), electrophysiological measurements (e.g. OAE, ECochG and ABR) and vestibular tests to examine the vestibular system (e.g. VEMPs, vHIT and caloric test).
Participants are genotyped on the basis of blood samples.
The aim is to gain a better understanding of how certain genetic variants influence the function of the hearing system and why hearing loss develops so differently between individuals.