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27. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Audiologie
und Arbeitstagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutschsprachiger Audiologen, Neurootologen und Otologen

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Audiologie e. V. und ADANO

19. - 21.03.2025, Göttingen

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The functional consequences of ageing on sound encoding by auditory nerve fibers

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  • presenting/speaker Amarins Heeringa - Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Department for Neuroscience, Oldenburg, Deutschland

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Audiologie e. V. und ADANO. 27. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Audiologie und Arbeitstagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutschsprachiger Audiologen, Neurootologen und Otologen. Göttingen, 19.-21.03.2025. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2025. Doc011

doi: 10.3205/25dga011, urn:nbn:de:0183-25dga0110

Published: March 18, 2025

© 2025 Heeringa.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Outline

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Auditory nerve fibers typically show a large variety of spontaneous rates, ranging from 0 to up to 200 spikes/s. This spontaneous rate correlates with the fiber’s sound encoding features, such as rate threshold, first-spike latency, and phase locking. It is believed that this underlies the large dynamic range of the auditory nerve for encoding rich acoustic environments. In this study, spikes of auditory nerve fibers were recorded from young-adult and old Mongolian gerbils. In the gerbil, known for its good low-frequency hearing, the distribution of spontaneous rate, and thus also of the response features, differs between low- and high-frequency regions of the cochlea. Here, I will show how ageing affects the auditory nerve fiber functional heterogeneity along the gerbil cochlea and which age-related degenerative processes in the cochlea can explain these results.