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Hearing loss is associated with difficulties in understanding speech, especially under adverse listening conditions. In these situations, seeing the speaker improves speech intelligibility in hearing-impaired participants. On the neuronal level, previous research has shown cross-modal plastic reorganization in the auditory cortex following hearing loss leading to altered processing of auditory, visual and audio-visual information. However, how reduced auditory input effects audio-visual speech perception in hearing-impaired subjects is largely unknown. We here investigated the impact of mild to moderate age-related hearing loss on processing audio-visual speech using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Normal-hearing and hearing-impaired participants performed two audio-visual speech integration tasks: a sentence detection task inside the scanner and the McGurk illusion outside the scanner. Both tasks consisted of congruent and incongruent audio-visual conditions, as well as auditory-only and visual-only conditions. We found a significantly stronger McGurk illusion in the hearing-impaired participants, which indicates stronger audio-visual integration. Neurally, hearing loss was associated with an increased recruitment of frontal brain areas when processing incongruent audio-visual, auditory and also visual speech stimuli, which may reflect the increased effort to perform the task. Hearing loss modulated both the audio-visual integration strength measured with the McGurk illusion and brain activation in frontal areas in the sentence task, showing stronger integration and higher brain activation with increasing hearing loss. Incongruent compared to congruent audio-visual speech revealed an opposite brain activation pattern in left ventral postcentral gyrus in both groups, with higher activation in hearing-impaired participants in the incongruent condition. Our results indicate that already mild to moderate hearing loss impacts audio-visual speech processing accompanied by changes in brain activation particularly involving frontal areas. These changes are modulated by the extent of hearing loss. •Mild to moderate hearing-impaired participants show stronger McGurk illusion•Increased frontal lobe recruitment in age-related hearing loss•Incongruent audio-visual input differently processed in hearing-impaired subjects

As part of the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, the hypothalamus exerts pivotal influence on metabolic and endocrine homeostasis. With age, these processes are subject to considerable change, resulting in increased prevalence of physical disability and cardiac disorders. Yet, research on the aging human hypothalamus is lacking. To assess detailed hypothalamic microstructure in middle adulthood, 39 healthy participants (35–65 years) underwent comprehensive structural magnetic resonance imaging. In addition, we studied HPA axis dysfunction proxied by hair cortisol and waist circumference as potential risk factors for hypothalamic alterations. We provide first evidence of regionally different hypothalamic microstructure, with age effects in its anterior–superior subunit, a critical area for HPA axis regulation. Further, we report that waist circumference was related to increased free water and decreased iron content in this region. In age, hair cortisol was additionally associated with free water content, such that older participants with higher cortisol levels were more vulnerable to free water content increase than younger participants. Overall, our results suggest no general age-related decline in hypothalamic microstructure. Instead, older individuals could be more susceptible to risk factors of hypothalamic decline especially in the anterior–superior subregion, including HPA axis dysfunction, indicating the importance of endocrine and stress management in age.

Age-related hearing loss is associated with a decrease in hearing abilities for high frequencies. This increases not only the difficulty to understand speech but also the experienced listening effort. Task based neuroimaging studies in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired participants show an increased frontal activation during effortful speech perception in the hearing-impaired. Whether the increased effort in everyday listening in hearing-impaired even impacts functional brain connectivity at rest is unknown. Nineteen normal-hearing and nineteen hearing-impaired participants with mild to moderate hearing loss participated in the study. Hearing abilities, listening effort and resting state functional connectivity were assessed. Our results indicate no differences in functional connectivity between hearing-impaired and normal-hearing participants. Increased listening effort, however, was related to significantly decreased functional connectivity between the dorsal attention network and the precuneus and superior parietal lobule as well as between the auditory and the inferior frontal cortex. We conclude that already mild to moderate age-related hearing loss can impact resting state functional connectivity. It is however not the hearing loss itself but the individually perceived listening effort that relates to functional connectivity changes.

Recent studies provide evidence for changes in audiovisual perception as well as for adaptive cross-modal auditory cortex plasticity in older individuals with high-frequency hearing impairments (presbycusis). We here investigated whether these changes facilitate the use of visual information, leading to an increased audiovisual benefit of hearing-impaired individuals when listening to speech in noise. We used a naturalistic design in which older participants with a varying degree of high-frequency hearing loss attended to running auditory or audiovisual speech in noise and detected rare target words. Passages containing only visual speech served as a control condition. Simultaneously acquired scalp electroencephalography (EEG) data were used to study cortical speech tracking. Target word detection accuracy was significantly increased in the audiovisual as compared to the auditory listening condition. The degree of this audiovisual enhancement was positively related to individual high-frequency hearing loss and subjectively reported listening effort in challenging daily life situations, which served as a subjective marker of hearing problems. On the neural level, the early cortical tracking of the speech envelope was enhanced in the audiovisual condition. Similar to the behavioral findings, individual differences in the magnitude of the enhancement were positively associated with listening effort ratings. Our results therefore suggest that hearing-impaired older individuals make increased use of congruent visual information to compensate for the degraded auditory input. •We studied auditory and audiovisual speech processing in age-related hearing loss.•Cortical speech tracking and task performance were increased for audiovisual speech.•The behavioral enhancement was related to hearing loss and listening effort.•Listening effort modulated the audiovisual increase in cortical speech tracking.

The hypothalamus is a small, yet highly versatile structure mainly involved in bodily functions such as control of food intake and endocrine activity. Functional anatomy of different hypothalamic areas is mainly investigated using structural MRI, validated by ex-vivo histological studies. Based on diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), recent automated clustering methods provide robust tools for parcellation. Using data of 100 healthy adults provided by the Human Connectome Project Database, we applied DWI-based automated clustering to the hypothalamus and related microstructural properties in these hypothalamic compartments to obesity. Our results suggest that the hypothalamus can be reliably partitioned into four clusters in each hemisphere using diffusion-based parcellation. These correspond to an anterior–superior, anterior-inferior, intermediate, and posterior cluster. Obesity was predicted by mean diffusivity of the anterior–superior cluster, suggesting altered inhibition of food intake. The proposed method provides an automated hypothalamic parcellation technique based on DWI data to explore anatomy and function of hypothalamic subunits in vivo in humans.

Age-related hearing loss has been related to a compensatory increase in audio-visual integration and neural reorganization including alterations in functional resting state connectivity. How these two changes are linked in elderly listeners is unclear. The current study explored modulatory effects of hearing thresholds and audio-visual integration on resting state functional connectivity. We analysed a large set of resting state data of 65 elderly participants with a widely varying degree of untreated hearing loss. Audio-visual integration, as gauged with the McGurk effect, increased with progressing hearing thresholds. On the neural level, McGurk illusions were negatively related to functional coupling between motor and auditory regions. Similarly, connectivity of the dorsal attention network to sensorimotor and primary motor cortices was reduced with increasing hearing loss. The same effect was obtained for connectivity between the salience network and visual cortex. Our findings suggest that with progressing untreated age-related hearing loss, functional coupling at rest declines, affecting connectivity of brain networks and areas associated with attentional, visual, sensorimotor and motor processes. Especially connectivity reductions between auditory and motor areas were related to stronger audio-visual integration found with increasing hearing loss.

•Structural connections among audiovisual integration (AVI) brain areas can be successfully reconstructed in newborns.•The connective probability and the spatial trajectory of certain AVI fibers in newborns are adult-like, others not yet.•The traced AVI connections are characterized by microstructural properties in line with the overall typically-developing white matter.•Perinatal characteristics, such as weight at birth, are significant predictors of individual differences in microstructural properties of neonates.•Female neonates exhibit slightly more developed AVI fiber tracts. Audiovisual integration has been related with cognitive-processing and behavioral advantages, as well as with various socio-cognitive disorders. While some studies have identified brain regions instantiating this ability shortly after birth, little is known about the structural pathways connecting them. The goal of the present study was to reconstruct fiber tracts linking AVI regions in the newborn in-vivo brain and assess their adult-likeness by comparing them with analogous fiber tracts of young adults. We performed probabilistic tractography and compared connective probabilities between a sample of term-born neonates (N = 311; the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP, http://www.developingconnectome.org) and young adults (N = 311 The Human Connectome Project; https://www.humanconnectome.org/) by means of a classification algorithm. Furthermore, we computed Dice coefficients to assess between-group spatial similarity of the reconstructed fibers and used diffusion metrics to characterize neonates’ AVI brain network in terms of microstructural properties, interhemispheric differences and the association with perinatal covariates and biological sex. Overall, our results indicate that the AVI fiber bundles were successfully reconstructed in a vast majority of neonates, similarly to adults. Connective probability distributional similarities and spatial overlaps of AVI fibers between the two groups differed across the reconstructed fibers. There was a rank-order correspondence of the fibers’ connective strengths across the groups. Additionally, the study revealed patterns of diffusion metrics in line with early white matter developmental trajectories and a developmental advantage for females. Altogether, these findings deliver evidence of meaningful structural connections among AVI regions in the newborn in-vivo brain.

Age-related hearing loss typically affects the hearing of high frequencies in older adults. Such hearing loss influences the processing of spoken language, including higher-level processing such as that of complex sentences. Hearing aids may alleviate some of the speech processing disadvantages associated with hearing loss. However, little is known about the relation between hearing loss, hearing aid use, and their effects on higher-level language processes. This neuroimaging (fMRI) study examined these factors by measuring the comprehension and neural processing of simple and complex spoken sentences in hard-of-hearing older adults ( n  = 39). Neither hearing loss severity nor hearing aid experience influenced sentence comprehension at the behavioral level. In contrast, hearing loss severity was associated with increased activity in left superior frontal areas and the left anterior insula, but only when processing specific complex sentences (i.e. object-before-subject) compared to simple sentences. Longer hearing aid experience in a sub-set of participants ( n  = 19) was associated with recruitment of several areas outside of the core speech processing network in the right hemisphere, including the cerebellum, the precentral gyrus, and the cingulate cortex, but only when processing complex sentences. Overall, these results indicate that brain activation for language processing is affected by hearing loss as well as subsequent hearing aid use. Crucially, they show that these effects become apparent through investigation of complex but not simple sentences.

Impaired emotion recognition is common in individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and may, via deficient emotion self-regulation, relate to the frequently co-occurring affective and social problems. The present study used an emotional face-matching task and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural responses during the processing of angry and fearful faces and visuo-spatial control stimuli. Additionally, measures for emotion dysregulation, ADHD type, and age were investigated in relation to the behavioral and neural fMRI data. We utilized a sample of 61 adolescents/young adults with ADHD and 51 age-matched healthy controls (age range: 12–28 years). Participants with ADHD had higher emotion dysregulation scores than controls. They also reacted slower and less accurate in response to emotional but not visuo-spatial control stimuli. Neural response differences between emotional and visuo-spatial trials were significantly smaller in cases, particularly in the left amygdala. While coupling between the right amygdala and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex was stronger for emotional than visuo-spatial stimuli in control subjects, levels of positive coupling between the trial types did not significantly differ in participants with ADHD. Neither emotion dysregulation scores, nor ADHD type or age were related to the behavioral and neural processing alterations during the emotional face-matching task. Results indicate that emotion recognition deficits in ADHD are particularly associated with lower amygdala activation to emotional stimuli and alterations in the functional connections of the amygdala to medial prefrontal areas. Emotion recognition deficits and associated neural alterations were unrelated to emotion dysregulation, ADHD type, or age.