Mild Hearing Loss Can Impair Brain Function

Abstract

The emphasis of hearing loss research has been to establish the long-term consequences of permanent, severe to profound deafness. However, auditory processing deficits can be induced by transient, mild hearing loss during childhood. These deficits in perception, speech, and language processing can persist long after normal audibility is restored. One explanation for the persistence of these deficits is that transient hearing loss causes irreversible changes to the central nervous system (CNS) cellular properties that may lead to degraded stimulus encoding. Therefore, this review evaluates the premise that mild hearing loss during development induces behavioral deficits, and that these auditory deficits are causally related to changes within the CNS.