BDNF and Mental deterioration: Within this context, hearing loss, which is linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline in epidemiological studies [93,94,95], may reflect the fragility of an individual’s neural substrates, particularly of those that control fast (high-SR) auditory processing and auditory-modality specific recruitment of LTP-BDNF-dependent processing, rather than hearing loss, cochlear synaptopathy or age per se.