How does HIV affect the brain? Study: Hearing systems or windows

even with effective antiretroviral therapy, patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can cause damage to the central nervous system. However, the issue is mainly caused by disease, treatment or the body's immune response, which is still controversial. It is also difficult to detect these changes reliably early. The brain's auditory system may provide a window into how the brain is affected by
toxicity, according to a new study published in Clinical Neurophysiology. The study was carried out by a team from the Gaizel School of Medicine in Dartmouth and northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
" in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, we have been conducting a series
of hearing tests on a group of positive patients. Jay Buckey, a professor at the Geisel School of Medicine who co-led the study, said, "At first, we thought we'd find
toxic effects on the ear, but it seemed to affect the brain's ability to process sound." To
this hypothesis, the team used the so-called "speech-induced frequency follow-up response (FFR), an objective measure of auditory function." In this test, the researchers played sounds common to everyday speech, such as "ba," "da" or "ga," and scalp electrodes recorded brain waves. This provides an objective, non-invasive way to record brain waves and assess auditory function in the brain.
"Playing involves pitch, time, and sound and phrases, and FFR allows us to understand how the brain is handling these different acoustic components," said Nina Kraus, a communications science and neurobiology professor at Northwestern University and author of the paper. Comparing FFR results from 68
-positive adults and 59
-negative adults,
researchers found that while the hearing threshold was normal in hearing tests, the auditory neurophysiological response of
-positive adults to certain language cues was disrupted. They believe this confirms that hearing impairment is caused by the central nervous system.
, if you want to assess cognitive function, ask participants to do math, remember a string of words, do puzzles or tasks, and draw pictures. Buckey said, "It requires people to be trained in this type of test, and it may be specific to the language and culture of the subjects." The
important thing about our study is that the test does not require any action from the participants; it is passively recorded and subjects can even sleep or watch movies. Buckey said, "We think FFR has a bright future as a way to assess the brain easily and objectively."
team believes that FFR is a viable tool to learn more about not only the mechanisms of brain dysfunction associated with
, but also other brain-related diseases such as concussions, Alzheimer's disease and Zika virus infections.
concluded that the study provides objective evidence of HIV's relationship with central nervous system dysfunction. In addition, neurophysiology may provide a viable method for hiv's central nervous system health research.