When hearing loss masquerades as cognitive decline

alkiviadis.1961 shared this article with you from Inoreader When hearing loss masquerades as cognitive decline Via Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry current issue Audibility and processing effort can bias cognitive-test performance In recent years, dementia research has increasingly focused on age-related hearing loss and its association with accelerated cognitive decline and contribution to dementia risk.1 In this issue, Parker et al2 (pp172–176) investigated whether pure-tone audiometric thresholds (an indicator of peripheral hearing status) predict biomarkers of dementia-associated cerebral pathologies and cognitive performance in the preclinical older populatio n. Hearing thresholds were indeed negatively associated with scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a widely used screen for cognitive impairment. However, the authors noticed that this relationship was no longer significant when the auditory-based repetition item of the MMSE ("No ifs, ands, or buts.") was excluded from the analysis. From an audiological point of view, this finding is not surprising. Sibilant consonants, such as the plural marker 's' in the English version of the repetition item, are characterised by... View on the web Inoreader. Take back control of your news feed. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.