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posted by janrinok on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the what? dept.

"Could you repeat that?" The reason you may have to say something twice when talking to older family members at Thanksgiving dinner may not be because of their hearing. Researchers at the University of Maryland have determined that something is going on in the brains of typical older adults that causes them to struggle to follow speech amidst background noise, even when their hearing would be considered normal on a clinical assessment.

In an interdisciplinary study published by the Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers Samira Anderson, Jonathan Z. Simon, and Alessandro Presacco found that adults aged 61-73 with normal hearing scored significantly worse on speech understanding in noisy environments than adults aged 18-30 with normal hearing. The researchers are all associated with the UMD's Brain and Behavior Initiative.
...
Why is this the case? "Part of the comprehension problems experienced by older adults in both quiet and noise conditions could be linked to age-related imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory neural processes in the brain," Presacco said. "This imbalance could impair the brain's ability to correctly process auditory stimuli and could be the main cause of the abnormally high cortical response observed in our study."

In short, they think signal processing is to blame, not signal transmission.


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  • (Score: 1) by bug1 on Thursday October 20 2016, @08:18AM

    by bug1 (5243) on Thursday October 20 2016, @08:18AM (#416522)

    I have a constant ringing in my ears, which i attribute to tinnitus, the only thing that has worked for me as reducing background noise to an absolute minimum, then after a few days the volume i hear reduces. Not very practical though...

  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 21 2016, @02:22AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Friday October 21 2016, @02:22AM (#417045) Homepage

    Tinnitus can also be a symptom of hypothyroidism. I would bet this age-related processing issue is too (80% of people over age 50 have some degree of reduced T4-to-T3 conversion, thus hypothyroidism at the tissue level). I sound like a broken record on this, but it's probably the most underdiagnosed and ignored of all medical issues.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.