Good news for older people who have hearing loss

 A study published in Current Biology (Whitten et al., 2017) presents good news for older patients who have hearing loss and provides motivation for auditory training.  In a nutshell:
 

• Participants: Experienced hearing-aid users with mild to severe losses (average age = 70 yrs)
• Task of test group: Play a computerized listening game where the difficulty level changes adaptively by increasing background speech babble
• Rationale: Patients will learn to suppress the distraction of increasingly loud background babble by directing their attention to feedback cues provided by the game
• Duration of training: 8 weeks, 3 hrs/wk
• Findings: Speech-in-noise intelligibility improved
• by a whopping 25%
• Caveat: Gains were not long-term, so training should be ongoing

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