Hearing: Research on auditory diseases
The Foundation Voir et Entendre has also undertaken another public health stake: hearing loss.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates for 2005 are: 278 million people worldwide suffer from moderate to strong bilateral hearing loss. In France, one out of every 700 newborn children and one out of every 500 young adults suffers from severe to extremely deep hearing loss. A third of people over 65 have hearing troubles that bother them in everyday life.
The research carried out in the Foundation Voir et Entendre focuses on perception deafness which affects the sensory hearing organ, the cochlea which decodes acoustic signals and transforms them into electrical signals that are then interpreted by the brain.
An important network composed of French, European and, in particular, American collaborations support Professor Petit’s team. This team has, for the last fifteen years, focused on identifying the genes involved in some types of early hereditary hearing troubles and on understanding the molecular pathogen, which is essential to the development of new therapeutic tools. To this day the team has identified about twenty genes responsible for such troubles. Some of them are individual; others are part of a syndrome, for example the Usher syndrome. By clarifying the defective mechanisms of these troubles, the team has put itself at the forefront of molecular physiology of the cochlea. Each time a type of deafness is recognised by the gene involved there is a clinical description followed by a prognosis.
The researchers eventually hope to prevent or at least delay hearing troubles to as late as possible.
Link to the Department of Neuroscience of the Institut Pasteur
