Which types of hearing loss can be reversed?

Progressive hearing loss is very common, particularly as people get older, and there are no medical treatments to slow down or stop the progression for the vast majority of cases. Hearing loss is highly heterogeneous, both in its causes and in the resulting pathology. Therefore, we are likely to need a range of different therapies for different causes and different sites-of-lesion within the inner ear. Some types of pathology may be treatable, even reversible, while other pathologies may not be treatable. Therefore, diagnosis of the cause, or at least the site-of-lesion, will be important to stratify patients for clinical trials, then to select the best treatment for each person. In this talk, I will summarise our understanding of the different ways we can lose our hearing, our progress using model systems to establish which types of pathology could be reversed, and how mouse mutants are giving us clues to how to distinguish different sites-of-lesion.