Postoperative rehabilitation effect and influence factors of adult prelingual deafness with cochlear implant

Abstract

Objective: To investigate whether pre-lingual deafness adult caused by inadequate auditory compensation in childhood can benefit from cochlear implants and the related influencing factors. Methods: A total of 26 prelingual deafness as experimental group [11 males and 15 females, the age of operation was (24.5±5.7) years] and 13 postlingual deafness as control group [5 males and 8 females, the age at the time of operation was (42.2±11.4) years] were recruited. Objective assessment included hearing threshold and speech recognition rate tests while wearing cochlear implants. Subjective assessment used Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire to assess hearing-related quality of life of subjects. The changes of hearing ability in the prelingual deafness group before and after operation and the differences with the postlingual deafness group were compared, and the correlation between speech recognition ability and the age diagnosed as severe or profound deafness, the age of hearing aid invalid, and duration of wearing cochlear implant were analyzed as factor indicators. All statistical results were analyzed by SAS 9.4 software. Results: In terms of objective indicators, the speech recognition rate of pre-lingual deafness was significantly lower than that of post-lingual deafness [(35.4±28.0)% vs (80.9±8.0)%,t=7.67, P<0.001], while there was no statistical difference in hearing threshold between the two groups [(34.8±4.0) dB HL vs (33.1±3.7) dB HL, t=1.30, P>0.05]. The indicators in the subjective questionnaire showed that the prelingual deafness group was only weaker in advanced sound perception, confidence and total mean score than the post-lingual deafness group (P<0.05), and there was no significant difference in other aspects(P>0.05), meanwhile, all indicators of the prelingual deafness group were significantly improved compared with the preoperative level (P<0.001). There was a moderate positive correlation between the hearing quality and the speech recognition rate in the prelingual deafness group(r=0.51, P=0.008). The regression analysis showed that the invalid age of hearing aid was the exact influencing factor of speech recognition rate. Conclusions: Certain prelingual deaf adults can adapt to cochlear implants and obtain different degrees of auditory assistance. Compared with the improvement of objective auditory ability assessment, the patient who received cochlear implantation gain more improvement in auditory related quality of life subjectively. The ineffective age of preoperative hearing aid is an important factor, which needs to be aroused sufficient preoperative attention.