Mohammed A, Gibbons LE, Gates G, et al. - Abnormal central auditory processing as determined by dichotic tests was identified to be independently related to dementia and Alzheimer dementia (AD) risk.

• A prospective cohort study including 280 adults without dementia, to investigate the links between signal sensitivity, central auditory processing, and dementia and AD risk.

• Hearing tests employed were: pure tone signal audibility, a monaural word recognition test, and 2 dichotic tests: the Dichotic Sentence Identification test and the Dichotic Digits test.

• Measures of dichotic auditory processing were found to be linked with elevated risk of dementia and AD, independently of signal sensitivity.

• A weak and insignificant association was found between measures of signal audibility and dementia risk, and that link vanished when controlling for dichotic auditory processing.