Thursday, February 27, 2014

Increased sensitivity to low frequency vibration found in people with inherited hearing loss

Increased sensitivity to low frequency vibration found in people with inherited hearing loss:



according to Gary Lewin and Thomas Jentsch. "The skin has several different types of mechanoreceptors, which respond to different qualities of stimuli, especially to different frequency ranges. The interaction of different receptor classes is important for the touch sensation. Although the receptors we studied became more sensitive due to the loss of the potassium channel, this may be outweighed by the disadvantage of the wrong 'tuning to other frequencies'. With KCNQ4 we have for the first time identified a human gene that changes the traits of the touch sensation."