Vol. 94 No. 11 November　2001

Inner Ear Diseases and Immunity

      The etiology in most inner ear diseases remains to be clarified and although immunologic injury was implicated in the pathogenesis of inner ear disease in McCabe’s report, “Auto Immune Sensorineural Hearing Loss”, an autoimmune etiology could not be proven because the inner ear is an extremely small sensory organ. Recently, advances in the cellular and molecular analysis of immunological reactivity have been increasingly applied to diseases of the inner ear, and in this chapter, the author first describes some animal models of immune mediated inner ear diseases, followed by discussion of clinical studies. The immunological study of immune mediated inner ear diseases often requires readily available purified inner ear antigen. Some authors have reported that the fractionations (32-35,45,68kDa) of the inner ear proteins from the inner ear tissue were important in immune mediated inner ear diseases, however, these proteins are widely distributed and not specific to the inner ear. Further purification of the antigens from the corresponding inner ear locations and the study of their amino acid and DNA sequences, in order to synthesize inner ear antigens for use in clinical investigation into inner ear diseases, may be possible in the future.

Key words : inner ear diseases, immunology of inner ear, antigen