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 Researchers asked 24 elderly adults who used hearing aids to spend
3.5 hours a week for eight weeks playing computer games. Half of the
participants were randomly assigned to play games designed to help
improve their ability to follow conversations, while the other half
played games focused on memory that weren’t intended to help their
hearing skills.
People playing memory games didn’t improve their ability to make out
words during conversations. But participants in the other group did
improve, correctly identifying 25 percent more words in spoken
sentences after playing the games.
“The use of auditory perceptual training is fairly well established
in training individuals to cope with tinnitus and to assist hearing
impaired patients (especially the elderly) to hear and process
speech more efficiently noisy situations,” said Dr. Allen Senne, an
audiologist at the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles who wasn’t
involved in the study.
“The training is based on the theory of neural plasticity and the
ability to train or ‘remap’ the neural connections in the brain to
deal with either tinnitus, or background noise,” Senne said by
email.
For many people with hearing challenges, trying to follow a
conversation in a crowded restaurant or other noisy venue is a major
struggle, even with hearing aids.
Study participants were 70 years old on average and had been using
hearing aids for around seven years.
All of the computer games they played required them to construct
jigsaw puzzles using a touchscreen tablet.
People in the memory group had to use word recall to assemble the
puzzles, while individuals in the other group had to rely on subtle
changes in sounds to complete the puzzles.
Participants didn’t know which group they had been assigned to, and
neither did researchers evaluating their listening comprehension
skills after they played the games.
People in both groups improved on their respective auditory tasks
and had comparable expectations for improved speech processing.
Among people who played the audio games, higher scores were
associated with bigger gains in speech comprehension, the study
found.
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But the benefits didn’t last. Testing seven weeks after participants
stopped playing the audio games revealed that their improved ability
to understand spoken words in a noisy room had gone away.
Beyond its small size, other limitations of the study include a lack
of data to show whether this type of computer game might benefit
people in real life, lead author Jonathon Whitton of Harvard
University in Boston and colleagues note in Current Biology.
Whitton did not respond to requests for comment.
Some participants also did worse after playing the games than they
did before, and it’s unclear why this happened.
Even so, the idea of brain training games to aid people with hearing
loss has long drawn interest from clinicians and there are a variety
of commercially available programs that patients can try, noted
Colleen Le Prell, a researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“There are no ‘back-to-back’ studies comparing outcomes with the
different training programs, and the level of evidence for most
training programs is generally rather limited,” Le Prell said by
email. “However, given a number of studies potentially suggesting
benefit of various training program, it is possible that an
individual who is willing to make a commitment to regular training
(defined by some as 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week, for at
least one month) might obtain some benefit.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2lHyHP3 Current Biology, online October 19,
2017.
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