Cochlear implants in post-lingually deafened patients.
CONCLUSIONS
Post-lingually deafened patients had good speech intelligibility scores with cochlear implantation. The age at the operation, duration of deafness, and the number of electrodes outside the cochlea showed only weak correlation with the postoperative performance, which warrants cochlear implantation in elderly patients and patients with a long history of deafness and leaving dummy electrodes outside the cochlea. Patients with cochlear obstruction showed comparable performance to patients with an open cochlea.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the background and performance of post-lingually deafened cochlear implantation recipients.


METHODS
Preoperative and intraoperative factors were collected for 109 cochlear implant subjects. Speech intelligibility scores were obtained and the effects of preoperative and intraoperative factors on postoperative performance were evaluated.


RESULTS
The average speech intelligibility score was 85.1% for vowels, 41.1% for consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, and 80.4% for phrases. The correlation coefficient between the age at the operation, the duration of deafness, and the number of electrodes outside the cochlea and the postoperative performance was between 0.03 and -0.27. Patients with cochlear obstruction and patients with open cochlea did not show significant differences in speech intelligibility tests. The onset of deafness (progressive vs sudden) did not have an effect on the speech intelligibility test.
Hiraumi
Harukazu
H
Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Japan. hhiraumi@ent.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Tsuji
Jun
J
Kanemaru
Shin-Ichi
S
Fujino
Kiyohiro
K
Ito
Juichi
J
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002648:Child; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003638:Deafness / Q000601:surgery*; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000601:surgery*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception