Health

December 15, 2009

Patients see success with implant surgery

By Geri Anne Kaikowski gkaikowski@timesleader.com
Copy and Design

When a hearing aid doesn’t work anymore, a patient doesn’t necessarily have to step back into a world of silence.

Cochlear implants have improved the quality of life for many adults who are not helped by hearing aids.

Gordon Hughes, program director of clinical trials at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, said adults who have recently lost their hearing because of disease, medications that cause hearing side effects or trauma seek the devices, usually encouraged by a family member who has noticed their increasing withdrawal from conversation and increased isolation due to hearing loss.

Cochlear implant technology has been around since the early 1980s, when adults first received them, but more recent scientific advances have made them more applicable to being implanted in the less fully formed skulls of babies and toddlers.

Researchers are also now finding that placing implants in both ears (the procedure had previously been one ear), as well as using combination cochlear implant/hearing aids, appears to significantly improve a deaf person’s ability to hear more nuanced sounds.

About 150,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants. In the U.S., it is estimated that 30,000 adults and more than 30,000 children wear them, according to Hughes.

“It is obviously a less sophisticated signal than what God or nature provides,” said Jeff Greiner, president and CEO of California-based cochlear implant maker Advanced Bionics, who says fairly intense hearing and speech therapy is required after an implant.

The best candidate for the surgery is someone who has lost his hearing and derives little if any benefit from a hearing aid. “Major forms of hearing loss are amenable to cochlear implants,” said Dr. Michael Ruckenstein, Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Philadelphia.

Cochlear implants are covered by most major health care providers, according to Ruckenstein, noting that Medicare considers it a standard procedure.

Send Question/Comment to the Publisher
Note: This will not appear in the "comments" section. Please see below to post a comment to the story