Non‐verbal dichotic listening: A new cognitive hearing test for dementia

INTRODUCTION Central hearing difficulties are a feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD) but not well captured by standard speech perception tests. METHODS We developed a non‐verbal dichotic listening test (NVDLT) based on everyday sounds, and compared this with a standard verbal dichotic listening test (VDLT) in 36 people with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), 18 with typical AD (tAD), 6 with right temporal‐variant frontotemporal dementia (rtvFTD), and 29 cognitively‐healthy controls. Daily‐life hearing function was assessed using the modified Amsterdam Inventory for Auditory Disability and Handicap (mAIAD). RESULTS On NVDLT, all dementia groups except rtvFTD performed worse than controls; tAD, logopenic‐variant PPA and nonfluent/agrammatic‐variant PPA performed worse than rtvFTD. NVDLT performance predicted atrophy in the retrosplenial cortex and hippocampus. NVDLT score discriminated tAD patients from controls with near‐perfect accuracy (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.99) and predicted daily‐life hearing function ( r = 0.57). DISCUSSION NVDLT performance indexes daily‐life hearing function and may aid dementia diagnosis, potentially in culturally‐diverse populations.