The majority of recently implanted, cochlear implant patients can potentially benefit from a hearing aid in the ear contralateral to the implant. When patients combine electric and acoustic stimulation, word recognition in quiet and sentence recognition in noise increase significantly. Several studies suggest that the acoustic information that leads to the increased level of performance resides mostly in the frequency region of the voice fundamental, e.g. 125 Hz for a male voice. Recent studies suggest that this information aids speech recognition in noise by improving the recognition of lexical boundaries or word onsets. In some noise environments, patients with bilateral implants can achieve similar levels of performance as patients who combine electric and acoustic stimulation. Patients who have undergone hearing preservation surgery, and who have electric stimulation from a cochlear implant and who have low-frequency hearing in both the implanted and not-implanted ears, achieve the best performance in a high noise environment.
KeywordsCochlear implants; Combined acoustic and electric stimulation; Bilateral cochlear implants Until relatively recently, most potential cochlear implant patients were bilaterally deaf in the conventional sense, i.e. they could hear little or nothing from either ear. After receiving a cochlear implant they could hear with one ear-the implanted ear. Today, most patients have some residual hearing in their better, or non-implanted, ear. These patients have the possibility of hearing bilaterally by combining electric stimulation (E) from their implant with acoustic (A) stimulation (S) from the contralateral ear. In this paper we will review our recent work with this population of implant patients and with two other groups of implant patients who receive bilateral stimulation including, (1) those who have been fitted with bilateral cochlear implants, and (2) those who have a single cochlear implant and who have hearing in both the implanted ear and the non-implanted ear. At issue in this article is the performance on tests of speech understanding by unilateral cochlear implant patients and by the three groups of 'two-eared' patients described above. How many patients might benefit from combining acoustic and electric
stimulation (EAS)?We have conducted a chart review of 276 adult patients who received a cochlear implant at either the Mayo Clinic, Rochester (n = 100), or at the School of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, Canada, (n = 176). The criterion for review was that the patients had been implanted within the last five years. Our interest was the hearing threshold at 250 Hz in the non-implanted ear. The results, in terms of audiometric threshold at 250 Hz, were binned in 5 dB steps from < 40 dB HL to > 100 dB HL and are shown in Table 1. Relatively few (n = 19) patients had thresholds of better than 40 dB HL. As would be expected, there were more patients with higher thresholds than with lower thresholds. The observation of interest is the cumulative number of patients...