A questionnaire was sent to 101 Nucleus 22-channel cochlear implant recipients aged 65 years and older to investigate the perceived impact of cochlear implantation on their quality of life. The questionnaire was designed to gain insight into the patient's daily use of the Nucleus implant. Sixty-seven questionnaires were returned over a 3-month period. The results of the survey showed that elderly cochlear implant patients obtained similar benefits to younger adult patients who were implanted with the same device. We believe that the results of this study will aid other centers when counseling elderly patients on the expected daily functional benefits of this device.
Research suggests that duration of deafness prior to cochlear implantation affects postoperative speech recognition in adults. Duration of deafness usually is defined as the number of years between the onset of profound deafness and implantation. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of duration of deafness-expressed as percentage of life with deafness-independent of age at implantation on postoperative speech recognition in adult postlingually deafened CLARION® Multi-Strategy™ Cochlear Implant users. Speech recognition tests (CID sentences and NU6 words) were administered to 202 consecutively implanted adults preoperatively and at 3 and 6 months after initial device fitting. Patients implanted at a younger age and those with smaller percentages of their lives with deafness achieved the highest levels of short-term postoperative speech recognition. Patients who had been deaf for >60% of their lives demonstrated a slower rate of speech recognition improvement than those with shorter durations of deafness, but still continued to improve with increased implant experience.
Preoperative and postoperative efficacy results are reported for the first 58 children with 18 months of implant experience in the United States. A within-subjects repeated-measures design was used to compare preoperative performance with hearing aids to postoperative performance with the CLARION® Multi-Strategy™ Cochlear Implant. The results revealed significant improvement over time on all speech perception measures. Higher scores and faster rates of progress were demonstrated by the children who used oral communication compared to children who used total communication, especially older children. The overall results suggest higher levels of performance and more rapid progress in the development of listening skills than has been reported in previous clinical trials with children. The latter finding appears to be due to advances in implant technology and changes in the demographic characteristics of the study groups. KEY WORDS-children, cochlear implant, communication mode.
This study compared clinical results obtained from 96 postlinguistically deafened adults implanted with the Nucleus 22 channel cochlear implant system. Seventy-one patients were fitted with a device that tracked the second formant of the voice, while 25 used one that tracked the first and second formant frequencies. Experience with the device averaged 3.7 months. Four subtests (four-choice spondee, vowel, NU♯6, and CID sentences) of the Minimal Auditory Capabilities Battery (Auditec of St. Louis recording) were used. In addition, 209 patients were administered live-voice measures (continuous discourse tracking and vowel/consonant identification) in three conditions: lipreading, lipreading plus device, and device only. Results revealed that the group using the two-formant tracker performed significantly better than those using the one-formant tracker on the following measures: (1) NU♯6 monosyllabic word test; (2) CID sentences; (3) continuous discourse tracking difference score (lipreading plus device minus lipreading); and (4) vowel and consonant identification in the device only condition. These findings suggest greater efficacy with the two-formant tracker; this is the strategy commonly in clinical use at the present time.
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