Aunt Elsie wouldn't wear her hearing aids. She had a drawer full. Her every other sentence started with, "What??? I can't hear you when you mumble!" Everyone who spent more than a short time with Aunt Elsie left with a headache and a sore throat from trying to communicate with her. Her son Tom wore himself out trying to find hearing aids that would work for her. He never did have any success. Most everyone put it down to the fact that she always was a difficult woman.
Aunt Elsie is gone now. The poor thing had a tough time of it those last few years because while she wasn't completely deaf, she missed enough that her life was a perpetual aggravation. And it appears now that perhaps her hearing aid problem might not have been the hearing aids after all.
Speech Recognition Problems May Not Be Due to Hearing Loss
 |
|
Although some hearing loss can be a normal part of aging, many older adults complain about difficulty understanding speech, especially in challenging listening conditions like crowded restaurants. Research has suggested that this decline in speech recognition is independent of hearing loss.
To identify what causes the decline in speech recognition, the researchers, led by Kelly Harris, PhD, at the Medical University of South Carolina, scanned the brains of 18 younger adults (19-39 years old) and 18 older adults (61-79 years old) as they tried to identify words in listening conditions that varied in difficulty. During a challenging listening condition, the older adults repeated fewer words correctly than did the younger adults, consistent with previous studies.
Harris and her colleagues found that structural differences in the brain's auditory cortex predicted performance on the task, even when they controlled for hearing loss. The older adults who had the most difficulty recognizing words also had the least brain volume in a region of auditory cortex called Heschl's gyrus/superior temporal gyrus. However, the relationship between the ability to identify words and the volume of auditory cortex was also present in younger adults.
"The results suggest an intriguing possibility -- that adults with low gray matter volume in auditory cortex may be at greater risk for problems understanding speech later in life," said the study's senior author, Mark Eckert, Ph.D., at the Medical University of South Carolina.
"Depressing though it may be, the new research by Harris and colleagues has shown that as we develop age-related deafness, investing in newer and more powerful hearing aids is only part of the solution. The brain, and particularly the auditory cortex, also needs repairing, and that is not so easy to achieve," Richard Wise, MD, PhD, at Imperial College, London, who was unaffiliated with the study.
If your elder is having trouble distinguishing words even with what you think are good hearing aids, you might want to have things checked out by a medical specialist before you invest in new ones. While audiologists have training in fitting hearing aids, they are not highly trained in neurology, which is where the real problem may lie.
If new hearing aids will not solve the problem, it is sometimes very helpful for a senior to meet with a brain and communications specialist. These highly trained therapists often have remarkable resources and techniques that can greatly improve the life of someone with hearing impairment. Ask the doctor for a referral to a communications disorders center.
 |
|
The research reported above was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health and the American Federation for Aging Research.
The Journal of Neuroscience is published by the Society for Neuroscience, an organization of more than 38,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system. Lead researcher Kelly Harris can be reached at harriskc @ musc.edu .