Association of Hearing Impairment with Brain Volume Changes in Older Adults
By Frank R. Lin, Luigi Ferrucci, Y. An, J. Goh, J. Doshi, E. Metter, Christos Davatzikos, Michael A. Kraut, Susan M. Resnick. NeuroImage, 2014
491 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Hearing impairment in older adults is independently associated in longitudinal studies with accelerated cognitive decline and incident dementia, and in cross-sectional studies, with reduced volumes in the auditory cortex. Whether peripheral hearing impairment is associated with accelerated rates of brain atrophy is unclear. We analyzed brain volume measurements from magnetic resonance brain scans of individuals with normal hearing versus hearing impairment (speech-frequency pure tone average > 25 dB) followed in the neuroimaging substudy of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging for a mean of 6.4 years after the baseline scan (n = 126, age 56–86 years). Brain volume measurements were performed with semi-automated region-of-interest (ROI) algorithms, and brain volume trajectories were analyzed with mixed-effects regression models adjusted for demographic and cardiovascular factors. We found that individuals with hearing impairment (n = 51) compared to those with normal hearing (n = 75) had accelerated volume declines in whole brain and regional volumes in the right temporal lobe (superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyri, parahippocampus, p < .05). These results were robust to adjustment for multiple confounders and were consistent with voxel-based analyses, which also implicated right greater than left temporal regions. These findings demonstrate that peripheral hearing impairment is independently associated with accelerated brain atrophy in whole brain and regional volumes concentrated in the right temporal lobe. Further studies investigating the mechanistic basis of the observed associations are needed.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Sensory Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c84e14604ff47e2322ae3f56d1756a43cbef11af
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Hearing loss and cognitive decline in older adults: questions and answers (2014, background): “A recent longitudinal study [20] has also demonstrated that hearing impairment is associated with accelerated atrophy in whole brain volumes and regions in the superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyri (regions critical for auditory processing but that also underlie other cognitive functions).”
- Association of Age-Related Hearing Loss With Cognitive Function, Cognitive Impairment, and Dementia (2017, background): “Age-relatedhearing losshasbeenassociatedwith increased global and regional gray matter atrophy and white matterhyperintensities,whereasADsubstratehasbeen found in the auditory neural regions but not in the peripheral auditory structures.(63) Studyquality assessment showed that reportingwas generally”