Neural and behavioral binaural hearing impairment and its recovery following moderate noise exposure

Noise-induced cochlear synaptopathy has been studied for over 25 years with no known diagnosis for this disorder in humans. This type of “hidden hearing loss” induces a loss of synapses in the inner ear but no change in audiometric thresholds. Recent studies have shown that by two months post synaptopathy-inducing noise exposure, synapses in some animal species can regenerate. Animal studies to date have focused primarily on peripheral hearing measures to diagnose ribbon synapse loss, while suggesting binaural listening deficits such as speech-reception-in-noise result from this disorder, but haven't accounted for the possible regeneration of synapses. To address this, we measured binaural physiological and behavioral function, the latter utilizing the pre-pulse inhibition of acoustic startle method, in both male and female adult guinea pigs following exposure to noise that has been shown to induce cochlear synaptopathy. Physiological measurements extended to 2 months post noise exposure to characterize any deficit and subsequent recovery. While common audiological assessments showed temporary threshold shift, reduced evoked potential amplitudes indicative of synaptopathy and measurable binaural electrophysiological hearing deficits post exposure, all measures recovered by 2 months. Suspected regeneration of synaptic ribbons occurred by 2 months post exposure and cochlear histology revealed no synaptic loss 4 months post exposure. Our results show that the same noise exposure protocol demonstrated to cause synaptic loss in prior studies causes physiological binaural processing deficits in the brainstem and that the recovery of neural binaural processing coincides with the regeneration of synapses shown in previous studies and normal binaural hearing behavior.