Mitochondrial genetics and hearing loss: the missing link between genotype and phenotype.

Mitochondrial DNA mutations have been implicated in a great variety of diseases, including such common ones as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, but the pathophysiological pathway leading from a specific mutation to a specific phenotype has remained elusive. Individuals with the same mutation can fall along a clinical spectrum ranging from asymptomatic to severely affected, and can even have completely different diseases. Much of this phenotypic heterogeneity has been attributed to the heteroplasmic nature of mitochondrial mutations, with both normal and mutated mitochondrial chromosomes being present in different proportions and tissue distributions. Isolated hearing loss is one of the only mitochondrial disorders that can be caused by homoplasmic mutations (e.g., only mutated mitochondrial mutations are present in all tissues). This review will outline the relationship between mitochondrial mutations and hearing loss while showing that even in a homoplasmic model, the two basic questions of mitochondrial genetics, penetrance and tissue specificity, remain unanswered: Why does the same mutation cause severe hearing loss in some family members but not in others, and why is the ear the only organ affected?