Active Research

Principal Investigators: Dennis Bourdette, Ph.D.

Objective: To validate a comprehensive test battery for characterizing CAP deficits experienced by MS patients and, based on highly encouraging pilot data, to evaluate the efficacy of auditory training strategies in rehabilitating these patients. The battery of tests includes behavioral and neurophysiological procedures, as well as neuroimaging. This investigation will ascertain whether the plasticity of the brain, as measured by neurophysiologic and neuroimaging measures in patients with MS, is sufficient to permit rehabilitation of perceptual hearing deficits through auditory training.

Background: This proposal is a continuation of a project titled Auditory Function in Patients With and Without Multiple Sclerosis, completed in 2005, which demonstrated that patients with MS had CAP processing impairments despite normal peripheral hearing. The CAP dysfunction may be minimized by the implementation of auditory training. Auditory training exploits the plasticity inherent in the central auditory nervous system and results have been found to generalize to other listening environments. As a rehabilitative technique, auditory training can alter the neural transmission of sound at the cortical and sub-cortical level thereby improving the timing and synchronization of neural responses.

Findings: Pilot data have shown that patients who received auditory training showed remarkable improvement in CAP tasks, whereas the non-treatment subjects did not. This proposal will assess CAP deficits in MS patients and evaluate the effectiveness of auditory training that uses the inherent plasticity of the central auditory system to improve auditory function. The information obtained from this investigation is likely to identify an effective remedial tool to minimize the functional auditory impairment experienced by these patients and to provide valuable information regarding the type and extent of auditory impairment.