Plasticity After Hearing Rehabilitation in the Aging Brain

Age-related hearing loss, presbycusis, is an unavoidable sensory degradation, often associated with the progressive decline of cognitive and social functions, and dementia. It is generally considered a natural consequence of the inner-ear deterioration. However, presbycusis arguably conflates a wide array of peripheral and central impairments. Although hearing rehabilitation maintains the integrity and activity of auditory networks and can prevent or revert maladaptive plasticity, the extent of such neural plastic changes in the aging brain is poorly appreciated. By reanalyzing a large-scale dataset of more than 2200 cochlear implant users (CI) and assessing the improvement in speech perception from 6 to 24 months of use, we show that, although rehabilitation improves speech understanding on average, age at implantation only minimally affects speech scores at 6 months but has a pejorative effect at 24 months post implantation. Furthermore, older subjects (>67 years old) were significantly more likely to degrade their performances after 2 years of CI use than the younger patients for each year increase in age. Secondary analysis reveals three possible plasticity trajectories after auditory rehabilitation to account for these disparities: Awakening, reversal of deafness-specific changes; Counteracting, stabilization of additional cognitive impairments; or Decline, independent pejorative processes that hearing rehabilitation cannot prevent. The role of complementary behavioral interventions needs to be considered to potentiate the (re)activation of auditory brain networks.