Predictors of audiological outcome following cochlear implantation in adults

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine variables that may predict open set speech discrimination following cochlear implantation. It consisted of a retrospective case review conducted in a tertiary referral centre with a cochlear implant programme. The patients were 117 postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant recipients. The main outcome measures were Bench, Kowal, Bamford (BKB) sentence scores recorded nine months following implant activation. The variables studied were age at the time of surgery, sex, duration of hearing loss, aetiology of hearing loss, residual hearing, implant type, speech processor strategy, number of active electrodes inserted. Variables found to have a significant effect on BKB following univariate analysis were entered into a multivariate analysis to determine independent predictors. Multivariate ordinal regression analysis gave an odds ration of 1.09 for each additional year of deafness prior to implantation (confidence interval 1.06-1.13; p < 0.001). Duration of deafness prior to implantation is an independent predictor of implant outcome. It accounted for 9% of the variability. Other factors must influence implant performance.

Older and Younger Adult Cochlear Implant Users: Speech Recognition in Quiet and Noise, Quality of Life, and Music Perception

“…The two groups were balanced for duration of deafness and length of CI use, both of which are known to impact postoperative speech understanding among CI users (Green, Bhatt, & Mawman, 2007;UK Cochlear Implant Study Group, 2004). Duration of deafness before implantation was defined as the time between onset of severe-to-profound hearing loss and activation of participant's CI.…”

Bilateral reorganization of posterior temporal cortices in post‐lingual deafness and its relation to cochlear implant outcome

“…In post-linguistically deaf adults, duration of auditory deprivation is a factor known to contribute to speech recognition ability after implantation [Blamey et al, 1996]. Additional factors contribute to outcome variability, e.g., pre-implant residual hearing [Rubinstein et al, 1999], but to date none of the identified clinical variables fully explains all of the variability [Blamey et al, 1996;Giraud and Lee, 2007;Green et al, 2007]. Other factors may intervene, including the amount and trajectory of cerebral plasticity that may have taken place during the period of deafness [Giraud and Lee, 2007;Lazard et al, 2010b;Strelnikov et al, 2010].…”

Relationship Between Age of Hearing-Loss Onset, Hearing-Loss Duration, and Speech Recognition in Individuals with Severe-to-Profound High-Frequency Hearing Loss

“…Studies of cochlear-implant (CI) subjects indicate that, for these subjects, whether hearing-loss occurred before or after the acquisition of language, and how long the duration of deafness was prior to implantation, are two of the most significant predictors of speechrecognition performance (Tong et al 1988;Busby et al 1992Busby et al , 1993Dawson et al 1992;Gantz et al 1993;Hinderink et al 1995;Kessler et al 1995;Shipp and Nedzelski 1995;Blamey et al 1996;Okazawa et al 1996;Rubinstein et al 1999;Van Dijk et al 1999;Friedland et al 2003;Leung et al 2005;Green et al 2007;Gantz et al 2009). In general, the results show that individuals in whom hearing-loss occurred postlingually achieve statistically higher speech-recognition scores than individuals who became deaf prior to the acquisition of language (Tong et al 1988;Busby et al 1993;Hinderink et al 1995;Okazawa et al 1996), and that the duration of deafness correlates negatively with speech-recognition performance (Gantz et al 1993;Blamey et al 1996;Rubinstein et al 1999;Gantz et al 2009).…”