Short-term hearing aid use reduces auditory cortical responses to speech-in-noise listening among older adults with age-related hearing loss

Katherine M Becker; Patrice Voss; Zaida Escila Martinez-Moreno; Francois Prévost; Anthony Zeitouni; Alejandro Lopez Valdes; Etienne de Villers-Sidani

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2026.1690956

Short-term hearing aid use reduces auditory cortical responses to speech-in-noise listening among older adults with age-related hearing loss

Front Aging Neurosci. 2026 Apr 16:18:1690956. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2026.1690956. eCollection 2026.

Authors

Katherine M Becker¹, Patrice Voss¹, Zaida Escila Martinez-Moreno¹, Francois Prévost², Anthony Zeitouni³, Alejandro Lopez Valdes^{4

5

6

7}, Etienne de Villers-Sidani¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
² Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, McGill University Health Center, Montreal, QC, Canada.
³ Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
⁴ Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
⁵ Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
⁶ Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
⁷ Trinity Center for Biomedical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Abstract

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is an increasingly common feature of aging and has been linked to poorer psychosocial wellbeing and increased dementia risk. Individuals with ARHL experience speech perception difficulties in noisy environments, wherein the brain must "turn up the volume" or upregulate neural activity to accurately parse speech from background noise. As the aging population steadily increases worldwide, it is essential to develop effective, non-invasive, and easily attainable interventions to reduce the societal impact of ARHL. Although hearing aids (HAs) have been proposed as an effective means to remediate or mitigate ARHL-related speech-in-noise perception, relatively few studies have investigated the short-term impact of HAs on brain function. In this preliminary study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate the neurophysiological effects of short-term HA use in individuals with ARHL during a speech-in-noise (SIN) task. Results revealed significant reductions in activity in right-hemisphere regions after only 3 months of regular daily HA use in first-time users. In contrast, we found that individual differences in SIN performance change were best explained by the magnitude of reductions in left-hemisphere activity following short-term hearing aid use. Taken together, these findings suggest that auditory cortical responses during speech-in-noise listening can be rapidly modulated by short-term hearing aid use, providing evidence for experience-dependent plasticity in older adults with age-related hearing loss.

Keywords: age-related hearing loss (ARHL); hearing aids (HA); hearing loss; magnetoencephalography (MEG); speech in noise (SIN).