A study of inner ear immune response after acoustic trauma

本研究的目的是探讨声学损伤是否能增强机体对抗原的反应。我用一种抗原致敏小鼠，通过圆窗膜(RWN)将其注射到耳蜗腔内，然后将小鼠暴露在噪声中。免疫组织化学分析表明，在耳蜗腔内抗原攻击时，耳蜗内存在炎症细胞的浸润。然而，噪声暴露不能激活在有抗原存在的情况下的耳蜗免疫反应。我推测，声压级较低的纯音比倍频程噪声刺激引起的内耳免疫反应更低。

The aim of this study is to solve whether acoustic trauma, which activates an inner ear immune response with cytokine expression and infiltration of circulating leukocytes could augment the response to antigen. I sensitized mice to an antigen, injected it intracochlearly, through the round window membrane(RWN), and subsequently exposed the mice to noise.The immunohistochemical analysis indicates that infiltration of inflammatory cells was present in cochlea with intracochlear antigen challenge. However, noise exposure cannot activate a cochlear immune response, which in the presence of antigen. I speculate that pure tone with lower sound pressure level causes lower inner ear immune response than octave-band noise stimulation.