White Matter Hyperintensities Predict Low Frequency Hearing in Older Adults

Abstract

Vascular disease has been proposed as a contributing factor for presbyacusis (age-related hearing loss). While this hypothesis is supported by pathological evidence of vascular decline in post-mortem human and animal studies, evidence in human subjects has been mixed with associations typically reported between a measure of vascular health and low frequency hearing in older women. Given the difficulty of characterizing the in vivo health of the cochlear artery in humans, an estimate of cerebral small vessel disease was used to test the prediction that age-related change in low frequency hearing and not high frequency hearing is related to a global decline in vascular health. We examined the extent to which these associations were specific to women and influenced by a history of high blood pressure in 72 older adults (mean age 67.12 years, SD08.79). Probability estimates of periventricular white matter hyperintensities (WMH) from T1-and fluid attenuated T2-weighted magnetic resonance images were significantly associated with a low frequency hearing metric across the sample, which were independent of age, but driven by women and people with a history of high blood pressure. These results support the premise that vascular declines are one mechanism underlying age-related changes in low frequency hearing.

Association of Age-Related Hearing Loss With Cognitive Function, Cognitive Impairment, and Dementia

“…64 Of interest, vascular dysfunction has been associated with lower-frequency hearing loss and white matter hyperintensities. 68 Alternatively, reallocation of executive functions to support accuracy in speech perception may be associated with decline in performance speed, as also observed in older adults with visual processing deficits. 69 …”

Cingulo-Opercular Function During Word Recognition in Noise for Older Adults with Hearing Loss

“…People with high frequency hearing loss that is characteristic of sensory presbyacusis may experience limited cingulo-opercular benefit because of structural declines in auditory cortex (Eckert et al, 2012), which would be expected to limit modulatory gain and benefit from attention systems during controlled auditory processing (Alain et al, 2004; Getzmann et al, 2015). Alternatively, people with low frequency hearing loss that is characteristic of metabolic presbyacusis may experience limited cingulo-opercular benefit because of small vessel disease that appears to affect the inner ear and frontal cortex (Eckert et al, 2013), which could limit the use of attention systems (Eckert, 2011; Kennedy & Raz, 2009). A study of older listeners with metabolic, sensory, or neural presbyacusis could explain when and why older adults will benefit from adaptive control in listening tasks.…”

Self-Assessed Hearing Handicap in Older Adults With Poorer-Than-Predicted Speech Recognition in Noise

“…Education level was used to control for potential individual differences in lexical access and fluency (Schneider et al, 2013). Last, the self-reported high blood pressure measure was examined because of evidence that high blood pressure can relate to declines in auditory function (Nash et al, 2011) and the morphology of brain regions (Eckert et al, 2013) that support executive functions during speechin-noise tasks (Vaden et al, 2013). Figure 2.…”