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Review
. 2024 Feb 28:16:1368232.
doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2024.1368232. eCollection 2024.

Sensorineural hearing loss and cognitive impairment: three hypotheses

He Zhao #  1   2   3 , Yan Wang #  1   2   3 , Limei Cui #  2   3 , Hanjing Wang  2   3   4 , Sha Liu  2   3 , Tiantian Liang  2   3 , Dawei Liu  2   3 , Jingjing Qiu  2   3 , Liang Chen  2   3 , Yan Sun  2   3
Affiliations
Review

Sensorineural hearing loss and cognitive impairment: three hypotheses

He Zhao et al. Front Aging Neurosci. .

Abstract

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is a category of hearing loss that often leads to difficulty in understanding speech and other sounds. Auditory system dysfunction, including deafness and auditory trauma, results in cognitive deficits via neuroplasticity. Cognitive impairment (CI) refers to an abnormality in the brain's higher intellectual processes related to learning, memory, thinking and judgment that can lead to severe learning and memory deficits. Studies have established a strong correlation between SNHL and CI, but it remains unclear how SNHL contributes to CI. The purpose of this article is to describe three hypotheses regarding this relationship, the mainstream cognitive load hypothesis, the co-morbidity hypothesis, and the sensory deprivation hypothesis, as well as the latest research progress related to each hypothesis.

Keywords: co-morbidity hypothesis; cognitive impairment; cognitive load hypothesis; sensorineural hearing loss; sensory deprivation hypothesis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that this research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial supports that could be considered a conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Three hypotheses regarding how SNHL leads to CI: the cognitive load 72 hypothesis, the co-morbidity hypothesis, and the sensory deprivation hypothesis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported in part by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#82371153), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (#2023 M731845), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (#ZR2021MH378 and #ZR2022QH073), and the Yantai Science and Technology Innovation Development Project (#2022YD009, #2023YD050 and #2020MSGY078).

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