VEGFA and presbycusis: Since vascular dysfunction is considered as a common etio-pathological marker for both presbycusis and NIHL, we performed immunofluorescence and western blot analyses to evaluate vascular injury in cochlear samples from NN and NE animals at 6 M. It is known that noise insult can compromise cochlear microcirculation (Hirose and Liberman, 2003; Shi and Nuttall, 2003; Hou et al., 2020), and VEGF expression often occurs in response to tissue ischemia/hypoxia through transcriptional upregulation by HIF-1α.