ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 22 August 2019 doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00284 Edited by: Arun Bokde, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Reviewed by: Shujiro Minami, Tokyo Medical Center, Japan Christiane Thiel, University of Oldenburg, Germany Fatima T. Husain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States *Correspondence: Tomasz Wolak t.wolak@ifps.org.pl Received: 11 March 2019 Accepted: 02 August 2019 Published: 22 August 2019 Citation: Wolak T, Cie´ sla K, Pluta A, Wlodarczyk E, Biswal B and Skar ˙ zy ´ nski H (2019) Altered Functional Connectivity in Patients With Sloping Sensorineural Hearing Loss. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 13:284. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00284 Altered Functional Connectivity in Patients With Sloping Sensorineural Hearing Loss Tomasz Wolak 1 * , Katarzyna Cie ´ sla 1 , Agnieszka Pluta 1,2 , El ˙ zbieta Wlodarczyk 1 , Bharat Biswal 3 and Henryk Skar ˙ zy ´ nski 1 1 Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing, Bioimaging Research Center, World Hearing Center, Warsaw, Poland, 2 Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, 3 Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Radiology, New Jersey Medical School, NJIT, Newark, NJ, United States Background: Sensory deprivation, such as hearing loss, has been demonstrated to change the intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) of the brain, as measured with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Patients with sloping sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) are a unique population among the hearing impaired, as they have all been exposed to some auditory input throughout their lifespan and all use spoken language. Materials and Methods: Twenty patients with SNHL and 21 control subjects participated in a rs-fMRI study. Whole-brain seed-driven FC maps were obtained, with audiological scores of patients, including hearing loss severity and speech performance, used as covariates. Results: Most profound differences in FC were found between patients with prelingual (before language development, PRE) vs. postlingual onset (after language development, POST) of SNHL. An early onset was related to enhancement in long-range network connections, including the default-mode network, the dorsal-attention network and the fronto-parietal network, as well as in local sensory networks, the visual and the sensorimotor. A number of multisensory brain regions in frontal and parietal cortices, as well as the cerebellum, were also more internally connected. We interpret these effects as top-down mechanisms serving optimization of multisensory experience in SNHL with a prelingual onset. At the same time, POST patients showed enhanced FC between the salience network and multisensory parietal areas, as well as with the hippocampus, when they were compared to those with PRE hearing loss. Signal in several cortex regions subserving visual processing was also more intra-correlated in POST vs. PRE patients. This outcome might point to more attention resources directed to multisensory as well as memory experience. Finally, audiological scores correlated with FC in several sensory and high-order brain regions in all patients. Conclusion: The results show that a sloping hearing loss is related to altered resting- state brain organization. Effects were shown in attention and cognitive control networks, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience | www.frontiersin.org 1 August 2019 | Volume 13 | Article 284