New Opportunities in Auditory Research: Innovative Approaches to Study Hearing Loss and Tinnitus

Speaker: Sharon Curhan, MD, ScM
Organization: Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School
Job Title: Physician, Epidemiologist

Hearing loss and tinnitus are complex and multifactorial. The session discusses how using large high-dimensional datasets can help identify modifiable risk factors, elucidate pathogenic changes, and identify prevention strategies for hearing loss and tinnitus.

• Learning Objective 1: After this course, participants will be able to summarize how epidemiologic methods and longitudinal health, diet, and lifestyle information can identify modifiable risk factors for hearing loss and tinnitus.
• Learning Objective 2: After this course, participants will be able to describe how innovative approaches like examining plasma metabolomic profiles reveal biomarkers for hearing loss and tinnitus.
• Learning Objective 3: After this course, participants will be able to describe how integrating diverse omics data provides a holistic understanding of the complex underlying biology.

About Sharon

Dr. Sharon Curhan, MD, ScM is a physician and epidemiologist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. As a clinical researcher in chronic disease epidemiology and prevention, her research focuses on the identification of risk factors for acquired hearing loss and tinnitus in several large ongoing cohort studies involving over 250,000 participants, the Nurses’ Health Studies, the Growing Up Today Study, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, with an emphasis on potentially modifiable risk factors that may aid in efforts towards prevention or delay of hearing decline. She is the co-founder and Director of the Conservation of Hearing Study (CHEARS) a large longitudinal investigative study of ear and hearing disorders and has published extensively on risk factors for hearing loss and tinnitus. Dr. Curhan received her MD from Harvard Medical School, a Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, and an ScB in Neuroscience from Brown University. She founded the Epidemiology of Auditory and Vestibular Disorders section for the journal Ear and Hearing, served as its section editor and as associate editor in epidemiology for other otolaryngology research journals. Dr. Curhan was a member of the WHO expert group that developed the WHO Ear and Hearing Survey Handbook and is also a member of NIOSH and Health National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) Hearing Loss Prevention Cross Sector Council and the NIOSH Noise Hazard Recognition Workgroup. Her research also encompasses other areas of neurocognitive and neurodegenerative disease, the epidemiology of herpes zoster (“shingles”) and associations with adverse health and quality of life outcomes, and is co-Director of the Channing Division of Network Medicine Healthy Aging and Longevity Consortium, bringing together a multi-disciplinary collaboration of investigators, clinicians and data scientists and consolidating the expansive high-dimensional resources to advance the understanding of aging and healthy longevity.

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