No association between age-related hearing loss and brain age derived from structural neuroimaging data

Aging affects the brain's underlying biophysical structure as well as its cellular and molecular functioning. Brain aging varies largely across individuals and is increased in a variety of disease states. Age-related hearing loss affects a large part of the older population and has been shown to correlate with changes in cognition, brain structure and function. The main aim of this study was to investigate whether an increased brain-predicted age is related to age-related hearing loss, an increase in daily listening effort and a decrease in cognitive function. We used structural neuroimaging data from a large sample of elderly subjects (n = 169) with mild to moderate untreated age-related hearing loss or normal hearing. An established machine learning approach was applied to predict brain age from grey and white matter maps. The brain-predicted age and chronological age significantly correlated across all participants. However, the difference between the brain-predicted age and chronological age was neither significantly correlated with high-frequency hearing loss, nor was this difference between brain-predicted age and chronological age significantly associated with general cognitive status or daily life listening effort. A multiple linear regression approach including age, hearing loss, listening effort and MOCA score as independent variables did not reveal any significant predictors of the difference between brain-predicted age and chronological age. We conclude that untreated mild to moderate age-related hearing loss has negligible effects on brain age derived from structural neuroimaging data.