Florida Combined Otolaryngology Meeting 2024 – Rewiring the Brain in Hearing Loss

A basic tenet of neuroplasticity is that the brain will re-organize following sensory deprivation. A better understanding of cortical neuroplasticity accompanying hearing loss may allow us to improve intervention and rehabilitation for patients with hearing loss. Compensation for the deleterious effects of hearing loss include recruitment of alternative brain networks during cortical processing. Our experiments suggest that early stage, mild-moderate, age-related hearing loss ranging results in significant changes in neural resource allocation, reflecting patterns of cross-modal compensation from the visual and somatosensory modalities, increased listening effort, and decreased cognitive spare capacity. Older adults with untreated age-related hearing loss also show evidence of cognitive deficits. Treatment with well fitted prescription amplification reverses cross-modal recruitment of auditory cortex over the course of several months, coinciding with gains in auditory speech perception abilities, social-emotional processing and significant improvements in cognitive performance as measured by clinical tests of neurocognition. New data on preliminary results with over-the-counter hearing aids will be discussed. Learning Objectives: 1. Participants will be able to describe changes in cortical reorganization and cortical resource allocation in persons with hearing loss. 2. Participants will be able to describe the clinical applications of cortical neuroplasticity in patients with hearing loss who receive intervention via prescription and over-the-counter hearing aids. 3. Participants will demonstrate understanding of the theoretical and practical issues relating to neurocognitive benefits of early treatment of hearing loss.