Levett, Benjamin Aaron;
(2025)
Measures of real-world hearing in Alzheimer’s disease and primary
progressive aphasia.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Levett_10219361_Thesis_sigs_removed.pdf Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Hearing impairment and dementia are linked, but the nature of the relationship lacks consensus. Whilst the focus has been primarily on whether peripheral hearing loss can cause dementia, there is an increasing body of work suggesting that early brain changes due to neurodegenerative disease may cause hearing impairment. Here, I address measures of real-world hearing, which is vulnerable in major dementias but poorly captured by pure-tone audiometry, the standard clinical test for peripheral hearing function. In a series of linked experiments, I investigated how speech perception is affected under natural, everyday listening conditions in Alzheimer’s disease and logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia using a paradigm in which I manipulated the intelligibility of spoken words by applying background babble in simulated reverberant listening conditions. I assessed auditory scene analysis using spoken words and non-verbal sounds presented dichotically in Alzheimer’s disease, logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia, nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia, semantic variant primary progressive aphasia and right temporal variant frontotemporal dementia. I investigated the temporal dynamics of the auditory verbal short-term memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease, logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia and nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia using paradigms in which I modulated the presentation rate and the inter-trial gap duration in verbal repetition tasks. These findings define signatures of real-world hearing impairment in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia syndromes using novel tools and markers. These could find future applications in diagnosis and planning interventions to enhance daily life communication in these diseases.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Measures of real-world hearing in Alzheimer’s disease and primary progressive aphasia |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Neurodegenerative Diseases |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10219361 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
