Table 2. Functional gene pathways associated with the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in 12-month-old relative to 6–7-week-old cochleae (top 5 significant pathways).

	Gene count	P-value(<0.05)	FDR(<0.05)
Cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction	29	6.4E-35	5.9E-33
Chemokine signaling pathway	18	7.0E-18	3.2E-16
TNF signaling pathway	13	7.0E-14	2.2E-12
Rheumatoid arthritis	11	4.0E-12	9.2E-11
Toll-like receptor signaling pathway	11	3.4E-11	6.2E-10

The biological functions of 40 DEGs identified by the real-time RT-PCR array were significantly associated with these top five KEGG pathways with a P-value <0.01 and a false discovery rate (FDR) <0.01.