Lead Exposure-induced Hearing Impairments Can Be Remediated by Auditory Training

A team of researchers have discovered that auditory training can restore the hearing ability of young rats with hearing impairments from lead exposure. The result was recently published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“Low-level lead exposure has been shown to lead to hearing deficits and language disabilities in children. How lead produces these negative outcomes in children, however, remains largely unknown to date. The current research used a rodent model to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the effects of lead exposure,” says Xiaoming Zhou, who is a Professor of Neurobiology at the School of Life Sciences at ECNU, and a member of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai.

In an earlier study employing the same research model, Zhou’s group has identified the auditory cortex as a key area susceptible to lead toxicity in developing brains.

In the current study, researchers further discovered that rats exposed to lead during early stages of life displayed significant behavioral and cortical neuronal impairments in their ability to localize sounds compared to unexposed rats from a control group.

Fortunately, the impairments were largely remediated through subsequent sound-location discrimination training.

“These findings in an animal model provide insights into the possible neurological basis underlying the lead effects, indicating that auditory training might be a successful strategy for treating older children and adults with hearing and language disorders caused by environmental and pathological factors earlier in their life,” said Zhou.

The research was supported, in part, by the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (Grant number B16018) and the JRI Seed Grant for Collaborative Research (Grant number 20170317 JFXZ).

Journal Reference:

Xia Liu, Fanfan Wei, Yuan Cheng, Yifan Zhang, Guoqiang Jia, Jie Zhou, Min Zhu, Ye Shan, Xinde Sun, Liping Yu, Michael M Merzenich, Diana I Lurie, Qingyin Zheng, Xiaoming Zhou.(2018) Auditory Training Reverses Lead (Pb)-Toxicity-Induced Changes in Sound-Azimuth Selectivity of Cortical Neurons, Cerebral Cortex. 2018 Aug 23. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy199.