Neural signatures of auditory hypersensitivity following acoustic trauma
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, United States
Abstract
Neurons in sensory cortex exhibit a remarkable capacity to maintain stable firing rates despite large fluctuations in afferent activity levels. However, sudden peripheral deafferentation in adulthood can trigger an excessive, non-homeostatic cortical compensatory response that may underlie perceptual disorders including sensory hypersensitivity, phantom limb pain, and tinnitus. Here, we show that mice with noise-induced damage of the high-frequency cochlear base were behaviorally hypersensitive to spared mid-frequency tones and to direct optogenetic stimulation of auditory thalamocortical neurons. Chronic 2-photon calcium imaging from ACtx pyramidal neurons (PyrNs) revealed an initial stage of spatially diffuse hyperactivity, hyper-correlation, and auditory hyperresponsivity that consolidated around deafferented map regions three or more days after acoustic trauma. Deafferented PyrN ensembles also displayed hypersensitive decoding of spared mid-frequency tones that mirrored behavioral hypersensitivity, suggesting that non-homeostatic regulation of cortical sound intensity coding following sensorineural loss may be an underlying source of auditory hypersensitivity. Excess cortical response gain after acoustic trauma was expressed heterogeneously among individual PyrNs, yet 40% of this variability could be accounted for by each cell's baseline response properties prior to acoustic trauma. PyrNs with initially high spontaneous activity and gradual monotonic intensity growth functions were more likely to exhibit non-homeostatic excess gain after acoustic trauma. This suggests that while cortical gain changes are triggered by reduced bottom-up afferent input, their subsequent stabilization is also shaped by their local circuit milieu, where indicators of reduced inhibition can presage pathological hyperactivity following sensorineural hearing loss.
Data availability
All Figure code and data will be available on the Harvard Dataverse at the following:doi:10.7910/DVN/JLIKOZ
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC018974-02)
- Matthew McGill
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC014871)
- Ariel E Hight
Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation
- Anne Takesian
- Daniel B Polley
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC009836)
- Daniel B Polley
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC015857)
- Sharon G Kujawa
- Daniel B Polley
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC018353)
- Anne Takesian
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Animal Care and Use Committee and followed the guidelines established by the National Institute of Health for the care and use of laboratory animals.
Human subjects: The study was approved by the human subjects Institutional Review Board at Mass General Brigham and Massachusetts Eye and Ear. Data analysis was performed on de-identified data, in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.
Copyright
© 2022, McGill et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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