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.