Neuroanatomical changes associated with age-related hearing loss and listening effort.

Neuroanatomical changes associated with age-related hearing loss and listening effort. Brain Struct Funct. 2020 Sep 22;: Authors: Rosemann S, Thiel CM Abstract Age-related hearing loss is associated with a decrease in hearing abilities for high frequencies and therefore leads to impairments in understanding speech-in particular, under adverse listening conditions. Growing evidence suggests that age-related hearing loss is related to various neural changes, for instance, affecting auditory and frontal brain regions. How the decreased auditory input and the increased listening effort in daily life are associated with structural changes is less clear, since previous evidence is scarce and mostly involved low sample sizes. Hence, the aim of the current study was to investigate the impact of age-related untreated hearing loss and subjectively rated daily life listening effort on grey matter and white matter changes in a large sample of participants (n = 71). For that aim, we conducted anatomical MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in elderly hard-of-hearing and age-matched normal-hearing participants. Our results showed significantly lower grey matter volume in the middle frontal cortex in hard-of-hearing compared to normal-hearing participants. Further, higher listening effort was associated with lower grey matter volume and cortical thickness in the orbitofrontal cortex and lower grey matter volume in the inferior frontal cortex....
Source: Brain Structure and Function - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain Struct Funct Source Type: research