Cognitive aging
Does hearing loss change how the aging auditory cortex connects?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Among older adults, worse hearing went with stronger resting connectivity between the right auditory cortex and an attention-control region, while age itself showed no such link once hearing was accounted for.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-group correlational resting-state fMRI: seed-to-voxel connectivity from left and right Heschl's gyrus correlated with audiometric hearing thresholds, controlling for age, working memory and processing speed
- N
- N=31 · 31 older adults scanned once; follow-up analyses re-run without the five hearing-aid users
- Population
- Community-dwelling older adults aged 60-80 in the Phoenix area, native English speakers, right-handed, without dementia
- Outcome
- Voxelwise functional connectivity from left and right Heschl's gyrus and its correlation with pure-tone hearing thresholds (all frequencies, speech frequencies, high frequencies, each ear)
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Key findings
Both auditory cortices were functionally connected to auditory, sensorimotor and visual cortex and to the cingulo-opercular attention network. Greater hearing loss predicted stronger connectivity from right Heschl's gyrus to the dorsal anterior cingulate and supplementary motor area; this was driven by speech-frequency loss and by the left ear, and held without the hearing-aid users. Age, working memory and processing speed showed no significant connectivity correlations once hearing was controlled, and left Heschl's gyrus connectivity was unrelated to hearing.
Methodology
Thirty-one healthy older adults had their hearing measured with pure-tone audiometry, completed working-memory and processing-speed subtests of an IQ battery, and lay quietly in an MRI scanner for a 10-minute resting-state scan. The researchers correlated the activity of left and right Heschl's gyrus (primary auditory cortex) with every other brain voxel, then asked whether those connectivity maps varied with hearing thresholds after controlling for age and cognition, and vice versa.
Limitations
It is a small, correlational, single-time-point study, so it cannot show that hearing loss causes the connectivity change or that the change is compensatory; that interpretation is the authors' hypothesis. Participants ranged only from normal hearing to moderate loss, were mostly women and highly educated, and the authors note that more power is needed. No listening task or listening-effort measure was collected, so the link to attention during real listening is inferred from other studies.
How this study connects
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