Echo Hu/ Shanghai Daily news

Patients whose hearing was impaired in childhood can probably recover their hearing with the help of a scientific intensive hearing training.

Zhou Xiaoming, a professor in East China Normal University’s life sciences institute, and his American counterpart Michael M. Merzenich from the University of California, published their research results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a renowned scientific journal run by the United States National Academy of Sciences.

According to earlier studies, the sensorineural hearing of young mice will be hurt if they are raised in a noisy environment, and scientists usually believe such damage couldn't be fixed.

Zhou and Merzenich carried out intensive hearing training on adult mice using a specially designed program to help them distinguish a specific frequency from a set of sounds.

They found these experiment subjects recovered their hearing after training for more than two months.

The results have huge potential for future human application, scientists said.