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Updated: Feb 26, 2026
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Meta-analysis of quality-of-life improvement after cochlear implantation and associations with speech recognition
Theodore R McRackan1, Michael Bauschard1, Jonathan L Hatch1
1Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A.
Objectives:
Determine the impact of cochlear implantation on quality of life (QOL) and determine the correlation between QOL and speech recognition ability.
Study Design:
Two authors independently searched PubMed, Medline, Scopus, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature to identify studies reporting hearing-specific or cochlear implant (CI)-specific QOL outcomes before and after cochlear implantation, and studies reporting correlations between QOL and speech recognition after cochlear implantation. Data from the included articles were obtained independently by two authors. Standardized mean difference (SMD) for each measure and pooled effects were determined to assess improvement in QOL before and after cochlear implantation.
Results:
From 14 articles with 679 CI patients who met the inclusion criteria, pooled analyses of all hearing-specific QOL measures revealed a very strong improvement in QOL after cochlear implantation (SMD = 1.77). Subset analysis of CI-specific QOL measures also showed very strong improvement (SMD = 1.69). Thirteen articles with 715 patients met the criteria to evaluate associations between QOL and speech recognition. Pooled analyses showed a low positive correlation between hearing-specific QOL and word recognition in quiet (r = 0.213), sentence recognition in quiet (r = 0.241), and sentence recognition in noise (r = 0.238). Subset analysis of CI-specific QOL showed similarly low positive correlations with word recognition in quiet (r = 0.213), word recognition in noise (r = 0.241), and sentence recognition in noise (r = 0.255).
Conclusions:
Using hearing-specific and CI-specific measures of QOL, patients report significantly improved QOL after cochlear implantation. However, widely used clinical measures of speech recognition are poor predictors of patient-reported QOL with CIs. Laryngoscope, 128:982-990, 2018.
