A matched-pairs comparison of single and multichannel cochlear implants in children

Auditory capabilities of Nucleus 22 multichannel cochlear implant users were compared to those of matched 3M/House single-channel users. Six children who received either the 3M/House or Nucleus 22 cochlear implants were separated into three matched pairs. Group 1 consisted of two postlinguistically deafened adolescents, group 2 consisted of two prelinguistically deafened school-age children, and group 3 consisted of two perilinguistically deafened preschoolers. Participants were evaluated using auditory comprehension and discrimination tasks as indicated by the 3M/House and Nucleus 22 protocols. However, only tasks common to both were included here. While the 3M/House single-channel device has been under an IDE for children under the age of 18 years since 1984, the Nucleus 22 multichannel implant only recently became available for this age group. Thus, short-term evaluations at 6 months and 1 year postimplantation have been used for comparison. Two of the three groups indicated that the multichannel users performed as early as the 6-month level; the children in the third group performed equally. These results indicate that multichannel cochlear implants show great promise in deaf children.