Award-winning work
CISPLATIN OTOTOXICITY. MOLECULAR BASES FOR FUTURE TREATMENT OF INNER EAR DEAFNESS
Since the mid-70s it has been known that the use of some drugs intended to treat certain malignant tumours, such as cisplatin, results in a variable degree of neurosensory deafness estimated at 9-91%. A review of the literature has led to 36% deafness being accepted as the average number of people with hearing loss secondary to the application of this first-choice therapy in certain forms of testicular, breast, or ovarian cancer, etc.
To date, the alterations that these cytotoxic drugs cause on hearing and, to a lesser extent, the morphological damage they induce in ciliated cells have been reported.
Over the past twenty years, the Otological Research Group, founded by Dr Rafael Ramírez Camacho, has been studying the possible reversibility of inner ear deafness at Puerta de Hierro University Hospital in Madrid, along with Dr José Ramón García Berrocal.
If middle-ear surgical techniques and cochlear implants were designed in the 20th century, the 21st century will involve the medical treatment of previously impossible forms of management: such as deafness caused by ageing (presbyopia), physical noise and chemical poisoning through antibiotics and anti-tumour drugs, and hereditary deafness.
Over these years, the Group has designed experimental models of immune-mediated deafness in laboratory animals, the results of which have been transferred to the human medicine. A step forward is the research of the molecular bases that explain the alteration of the various cell lines of the organ of Corti.
The Otorhinolaryngology team at the Puerta de Hierro Hospital has published (the award-winning work is on this very subject) a sequence in histological alterations that provides time for the application of anti-apoptotic substances it is now working on, preventing the destruction of the sound transducer cell and, consequently, preventing deafness.
Reference: Ramírez, R and García J.R. (2008): “Cisplatin ototoxicity. Molecular bases for future treatment of inner ear deafness”. FIAPAS Journal, July-August 2008, No. 123, FIAPAS Supplement.