Monday, Jan. 23, 1939

Sex & Hearing

That the delicate linings of the nose are influenced by sex hormones is a theory well-known to biologists. Four years ago Biochemist Hector Mortimer of Montreal's McGill University and his colleagues, Dr. Robert Percy Wright and Nobel Prize-sharer James Bertram Collip, one of the discoverers of insulin, decided to put the theory to practical use. They dropped small amounts of female sex hormone estrogen into the noses of patients who suffered from atrophic rhinitis (withering of the nasal mucous membranes). Many patients recovered. But they were amazed when one woman announced that a ringing in her ears, which had irritated her for a long time, had cleared up.

On the hunch that hearing as well as smell was influenced by sex hormones, the researchers, with the aid of Professor David Landsborough Thomson, collected 39 women and 16 men who suffered from progressive deafness caused by diseased nerves or bony growths in the inner ear. They dropped small doses of estrogen mixed with one cubic centimeter of oil into the patients' noses once a day for periods ranging from three months to two years.

Result: at the end of treatment many of the patients, both men and women, showed "marked improvement'' in hearing.

Far back in the evolution of modern man, concluded the scientists, reporting their remarkable but so far inexplicable treatment in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last week, there may have been a direct relationship between ears and sex organs. Although the scientists cautiously refrained from stating that constitutional deafness is an endocrine disease, they did say that "sex hormone may still play a role in the physiology of hearing today."

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