Factors Affecting Auditory Performance of Postlinguistically Deaf Adults Using Cochlear Implants: An Update with 2251 Patients

Abstract

Objective: To update a 15-year-old study of 800 postlinguistically deaf adult patients showing how duration of severe to profound hearing loss, age at cochlear implantation (CI), age at onset of severe to profound hearing loss, etiology and CI experience affected CI outcome. Study Design: Retrospective multicenter study. Methods: Data from 2251 adult patients implanted since 2003 in 15 international centers were collected and speech scores in quiet were converted to percentile ranks to remove differences between centers. Results: The negative effect of long duration of severe to profound hearing loss was less important in the new data than in 1996; the effects of age at CI and age at onset of severe to profound hearing loss were delayed until older ages; etiology had a smaller effect, and the effect of CI experience was greater with a steeper learning curve. Patients with longer durations of severe to profound hearing loss were less likely to improve with CI experience than patients with shorter duration of severe to profound hearing loss. Conclusions: The factors that were relevant in 1996 were still relevant in 2011, although their relative importance had changed. Relaxed patient selection criteria, improved clinical management of hearing loss, modifications of surgical practice, and improved devices may explain the differences.

Adaptive benefit of cross-modal plasticity following cochlear implantation in deaf adults

“…The large range of CI outcomes that we observed, as well as the mean performance, is consistent with previous reports from large-scale, international studies (13)(14)(15), indicating that the CI outcomes observed in the present study may be considered representative of the wider CI population.…”

Stationäre Rehabilitationsmaßnahmen bei erwachsenen CI-Trägern

“…Blamey [3] ermittelte den Einfluss der CI-Nutzungsdauer als wichtigsten Einflussfaktor für die mit dem CI erreichten Hörleistungen. Im ersten Jahr nach der Implantation wurde der größte Leistungszuwachs beobachtet.…”

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].…”