Assessment of Benefits of Cochlear Implantation in Children With Single-Sided Deafness

To assess the hearing benefits of cochlear implantation and its daily usage in children with single-sided deafness (SSD). We compared the results of children with congenital/perinatal deafness and those with acquired deafness and evaluated the impact of age at implantation on performance.

There were 99 children with SSD in the study, all of whom had more than 14 months of experience with a cochlear implant (CI); 58 had congenital/perinatal SSD, while 41 had acquired SSD. The hearing benefit of the CI was measured with age-appropriate speech discrimination in noise tests and localization tests. Daily processor usage was obtained from parent interviews and datalogging.

For speech discrimination in noise, children with congenital/perinatal SSD demonstrated advantages of binaural redundancy and head shadow, while children with acquired SSD additionally benefited from the binaural squelch effect. Significant improvements in sound localization following a cochlear implantation were observed in both groups, with the benefit being slightly greater in the acquired SSD group. The mean daily processor usage was 10.3 h/day as reported by parents, compared with 7.5 h/day as recorded by datalogging, with no significant difference between the groups. There was no significant correlation between age at implantation and the benefits of head shadow, redundancy, and squelch, or in improvements in localization or daily processor usage.

Cochlear implantation is an effective treatment for children with both congenital and acquired SSD.