Cochlear implants in post-lingually deafened patients.

CONCLUSION

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.

PATIENTS AND 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.