Abstract
Our senses, including hearing and vision, play critical roles for survival. For example, the auditory system, which detects sound, and the visual system, which detects visible light, play essential roles in locating food, avoiding predators, and/or finding a mate in a variety of species. Aging can affect all of these sensory systems, but the auditory and visual systems are thought to be more vulnerable. The auditory and visual systems contain specialized sensory receptors: hair cells that detect sound waves in the cochlea and photoreceptor cells that detect visible light in the eyes. Age-related changes in the structures and functions of these sensory receptors and the cochlear and retinal ganglion neurons result in hearing and visual impairments, including age-related hearing loss, age-related macular degeneration, and glaucoma. A growing body of evidence suggests that mitochondrial dysfunction plays an important role in the age-related structural or functional changes to these sensory receptors, leading to hearing or vision impairments. This chapter reviews the current literature on genetic and molecular aspects of the aging of the auditory and visual systems, and examines the link between aging, mitochondrial dysfunction, and hearing and vision in rodents and humans.
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