Hearing Aid Use in Older Adults With Postlingual Sensorineural Hearing Loss: Protocol for a Prospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Older adults with postlingual sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) exhibit a poor prognosis that not only includes impaired auditory function but also rapid cognitive decline, especially speech-related cognition, in addition to psychosocial dysfunction and an increased risk of dementia. Consistent with this prognosis, individuals with SNHL exhibit global atrophic brain alteration as well as altered neural function and regional brain organization within the cortical substrates that underlie auditory and speech processing. Recent evidence suggests that the use of hearing aids might ameliorate this prognosis. OBJECTIVE: The objective was to study the effects of a hearing aid use intervention on neurocognitive and psychosocial functioning in individuals with SNHL aged ≥55 years. METHODS: All aspects of this study will be conducted at Swinburne University of Technology (Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia). We will recruit 2 groups (n=30 per group) of individuals with mild to moderate SNHL from both the community and audiology health clinics (Alison Hennessy Audiology, Chelsea Hearing Pty Ltd). These groups will include individuals who have worn a hearing aid for, at least, 12 months or never worn a hearing aid. All participants would be asked to complete, at 2 time points (t) including baseline (t=0) and follow-up (t=6 months), tests of hearing and psychosocial and cognitive function and attend a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) session. The MRI session will include both structural and functional MRI (sMRI and fMRI) scans, the latter involving the performance of a novel speech processing task. RESULTS: This research is funded by the Barbara Dicker Brain Sciences Foundation Grants, the Australian Research Council, Alison Hennessy Audiology, and Chelsea Hearing Pty Ltd under the Industry Transformation Training Centre Scheme (ARC Project #IC140100023). We obtained the ethics approval on November 18, 2017 (Swinburne University Human Research Ethics Committee protocol number SHR Project 2017/266). The recruitment began in December 2017 and will be completed by December 2020. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study to assess the effect hearing aid use has on neural, cognitive, and psychosocial factors in individuals with SNHL who have never used hearing aids. Furthermore, this study is expected to clarify the relationships among altered brain structure and function, psychosocial factors, and cognition in response to the hearing aid use. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12617001616369; https://anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?ACTRN=12617001616369 (Accessed by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/70yatZ9ze). INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): RR1-10.2196/9916.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".