ArticleNeuroImage2019
Neural distinctiveness declines with age in auditory cortex and is associated with auditory GABA levels.
Article in NeuroImage, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
- Association of age-related hearing loss with cognitive impairment and dementia: an umbrella review.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Dynamic Recovery: GABA Agonism Restores Neural Variability in Older, Poorer Performing Adults.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Neurovascular-metabolic coupling links hearing loss to cognitive impairment: Evidence from GABA and cerebral blood flow in presbycusis.Neurobiology of disease · 2026Article
- Parallel Age-Related Cochlear Neural Degeneration and Cortical Gain Adaptation in Normal-Hearing Humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Decreased BOLD Signal Variability in Middle-Aged and Older Adults on the Autism Spectrum.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- [Research progress on the mechanism of auditory center remodeling and clinical intervention strategies in presbycusis].Lin chuang er bi yan hou tou jing wai ke za zhi = Journal of clinical otorhinolaryngology head and neck surgery · 2026Review
- [Current status and future perspectives on age-related hearing loss and cognitive impairment].Lin chuang er bi yan hou tou jing wai ke za zhi = Journal of clinical otorhinolaryngology head and neck surgery · 2026Review
- Aging in the Primary Auditory Cortex.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2026Review
- The relationship between category-level neural differentiation and exploratory eye movements in healthy young and older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2025Article
- Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing.Communications biology · 2025Article
- GABA Levels Are Significantly Reduced in the Visual, Motor, and Auditory Cortex of Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment.Aging and disease · 2025Article
- Modulation of brain signal variability in visual cortex reflects aging, GABA, and behavior.eLife · 2025Article
- Review
- Reduced Neural Distinctiveness of Speech Representations in the Middle-Aged Brain.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Dedifferentiation of caudate functional organization is linked to reduced D1 dopamine receptor availability and poorer memory function in aging.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Broadscale dampening of uncertainty adjustment in the aging brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Frontal GABA levels associate with musical rhythm production in healthy aging adults.Brain and cognition · 2024Article
- Alterations of Excitation-Inhibition Balance and Brain Network Dynamics Support Sensory Deprivation Theory in Presbycusis.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Rebalance the Inhibitory System in the Elderly Brain: Influence of Balance Learning on GABAergic Inhibition and Functional Connectivity.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Age and visual cortex inhibition: a TMS-MRS study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Neural activation patterns in the ventral visual cortex in response to different categories of visual stimuli (e.g., faces vs. houses) are less selective, or distinctive, in older adults than in younger adults, a phenomenon known as age-related neural dedifferentiation. In this study, we investigated whether neural dedifferentiation extends to the auditory cortex. Inspired by previous animal work, we also investigated whether individual differences in GABA are associated with individual differences in neural distinctiveness in humans. 20 healthy young adults (ages 18-29) and 23 healthy older adults (over 65) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, during which neural activity was estimated while they listened to music and foreign speech. GABA levels in the auditory, ventrovisual and sensorimotor cortex were estimated in the same individuals in a separate magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) scan. Relative to the younger adults, the older adults exhibited both (1) less distinct activation patterns for music vs. speech stimuli and (2) lower GABA levels in the auditory cortex. Also, individual differences in auditory GABA levels (but not ventrovisual or sensorimotor GABA levels) were associated with individual differences in neural distinctiveness in the auditory cortex in the older adults. These results demonstrate that age-related neural dedifferentiation extends to the auditory cortex and suggest that declining GABA levels may play a role in neural dedifferentiation in older adults.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.