Archive for February, 2018

It can be hard for people with hearing loss to follow conversations in noisy places such as restaurants or at meetings even if they use hearing aids. But training your brain can help to get more out of the hearing aids, study finds.

An American study has found that elderly people with hearing loss can triple their understanding of words in noisy situations by training with a custom audiomonitor game.

How to train your brain

The brain-training audiogame is designed to improve the players’ ability to follow conversations. The game challenges the players to monitor subtle deviations between predicted and actual auditory feedback as they move their fingertip through a virtual soundscape.

All participants spent 3.5 hours per week for eight weeks playing the brain-training game. The participants were on average 70-years-old. All of them had mild to severe hearing loss and had worn hearing aids for an average of seven years.

Your brain causes hearing loss

After playing the game, the participants correctly made out 25% more words in the presence of high levels of background noise. The audiomonitor training resulted in more than three times the benefit of the subject’s hearing aids for speech processing in noisy listening situations, the study found. This means that the participants were better able to filter out noise and distinguish between a target speaker and background distractions, according to researcher Daniel Polley, Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School in the US. “These findings underscore that understanding speech in noisy listening conditions is a whole brain activity, and is not strictly governed by the ear,” said Daniel Polley.

Content provided by Hear-It.org

Studies show that those who suffer from migraine headaches have an increased risk of developing hearing loss than those who do not. Other studies indicate migraine sufferers are also twice as likely to suffer from sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL).

According to Migraine.com more than 37 million Americans suffer from migraine, a neurological disease characterized by episodes known as migraine attacks. A migraineur’s brain is biochemically different than the brain of a person without this disease, which can be genetic and typically affects more women than men.

So what does a neurological disease have to do with your hearing? Plenty, according to a study by researchers in Egypt’s Assiut University Hospital’s Department of Neurology and Psychology. Their findings were published in the American Journal of Otolaryngology.

Using electrophysiological testing, they looked at the function of the cochlea and auditory pathways of migraineurs compared to those who did not have the disease and discovered that two-thirds of the migraineurs had one or more abnormalities. Testing included the otoacoustic emissions test (OAE), which measures the echo produced by the vibrations of hair cells in the cochlea when it’s stimulated, and the auditory brainstem response (ABR) test, which measures the brain’s response to sound. The researchers hypothesize these abnormalities could be a result of compromised blood supply to the auditory system due to the migraine attacks.

This is significant because the sensory hair cells in the cochlea depend on healthy circulation to function properly. A decrease in circulation could eventually cause these hair cells to become damaged or die, causing sensorineural hearing loss.

Content provided by HealthyHearing