CCDC68 and hearing loss disorder: To our knowledge, this is the first report of a hearing loss phenotype for the remaining seven hair cell-specific risk genes: ANKRA2, ARHGEF28, CRIP3, CCDC68, EXOC6, GNAO1, IQCB1, and KLHDC7B. Hearing difficulty risk haplotypes contained protein-coding variants in 6 of these genes, while the others were supported by non-coding variants with predicted gene regulatory functions.