Short-term hearing aid use reduces auditory cortical responses to speech-in-noise listening among older adults with age-related hearing loss

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is an increasingly common feature of aging and has been linked to poorer psychosocial wellbeing and increased dementia risk. Individuals with ARHL experience speech perception difficulties in noisy environments, wherein the brain must "turn up the volume" or upregulate neural activity to accurately parse speech from background noise. As the aging population steadily increases worldwide, it is essential to develop effective, non-invasive, and easily attainable interventions to reduce the societal impact of ARHL. Although hearing aids (HAs) have been proposed as an effective means to remediate or mitigate ARHL-related speech-in-noise perception, relatively few studies have investigated the short-term impact of HAs on brain function. In this preliminary study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate the neurophysiological effects of short-term HA use in individuals with ARHL during a speech-in-noise (SIN) task. Results revealed significant reductions in activity in right-hemisphere regions after only 3 months of regular daily HA use in first-time users. In contrast, we found that individual differences in SIN performance change were best explained by the magnitude of reductions in left-hemisphere activity following short-term hearing aid use. Taken together, these findings suggest that auditory cortical responses during speech-in-noise listening can be rapidly modulated by short-term hearing aid use, providing evidence for experience-dependent plasticity in older adults with age-related hearing loss.