Farahani Ehsan Darestani, Wouters Jan, van Wieringen Astrid
Research Group Experimental ORL, Department Neurosciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Front Neurol. 2022 Aug 5;13:905017. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2022.905017. eCollection 2022.
People with age-related hearing loss suffer from speech understanding difficulties, even after correcting for differences in hearing audibility. These problems are not only attributed to deficits in audibility but are also associated with changes in central temporal processing. The goal of this study is to obtain an understanding of potential alterations in temporal envelope processing for middle-aged and older persons with and without hearing impairment. The time series of activity of subcortical and cortical neural generators was reconstructed using a minimum-norm imaging technique. This novel technique allows for reconstructing a wide range of neural generators with minimal prior assumptions regarding the number and location of the generators. The results indicated that the response strength and phase coherence of middle-aged participants with hearing impairment (HI) were larger than for normal-hearing (NH) ones. In contrast, for the older participants, a significantly smaller response strength and phase coherence were observed in the participants with HI than the NH ones for most modulation frequencies. Hemispheric asymmetry in the response strength was also altered in middle-aged and older participants with hearing impairment and showed asymmetry toward the right hemisphere. Our brain source analyses show that age-related hearing loss is accompanied by changes in the temporal envelope processing, although the nature of these changes varies with age.
患有与年龄相关听力损失的人即使在纠正了听力可听度差异之后，仍会遭受言语理解困难。这些问题不仅归因于可听度缺陷，还与中枢颞叶处理的变化有关。本研究的目的是了解有和没有听力障碍的中老年人在时间包络处理方面的潜在改变。使用最小范数成像技术重建了皮质下和皮质神经发生器的活动时间序列。这种新技术允许在对发生器的数量和位置做出最少先验假设的情况下重建广泛的神经发生器。结果表明，有听力障碍（HI）的中年参与者的反应强度和相位相干性比听力正常（NH）的参与者更大。相比之下，对于老年参与者，在大多数调制频率下，有HI的参与者的反应强度和相位相干性明显小于NH参与者。有听力障碍的中年和老年参与者在反应强度上的半球不对称性也发生了改变，并且表现出向右半球的不对称性。我们的脑源分析表明，与年龄相关的听力损失伴随着时间包络处理的变化，尽管这些变化的性质随年龄而异。
