Prognostication of Speech Performance in Patients With Multichannel Cochlear Implants

Abstract

James L. Parkin, MD, and collaborators at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, reported on the usefulness of preimplant anamnestic and test data to predict the performance of the Symbion multichannel cochlear implant. The study presented at the fall meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, Chicago, consisted of 20 patients. The patients had a wide range of performance scores on postimplant audiometric tests, environmental sound recognition ranged from 7% to 100% and open-set CID (Central Institute for the Deaf) sentences ranged from 0% to 100%. The investigators found that good lip readers, and those who had worn a hearing aid in the past, performed better with the cochlear implant, probably because these factors selected patients with higher motivation. Patients who had a duration of total deafness for less than five years performed best, and males performed slightly better than females. They found no correlation between