Assessing auditory nerve condition by tone decay in deaf subjects with a cochlear implant.

The condition of the auditory nerve is a factor determining hearing performance of cochlear implant (CI) recipients. Abnormal loudness adaptation is associated with poor auditory nerve survival. We examined which stimulus conditions are suitable for tone decay measurements to differentiate between CI recipients with respect to their speech perception.

The Sound of a Cochlear Implant Investigated in Patients With Single-Sided Deafness and a Cochlear Implant.

Hypothesis: A cochlear implant (CI) restores hearing in patients with profound sensorineural hearing loss by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. It is unknown how this electrical stimulation sounds.

Background: Patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) and a CI form a unique population, since they can compare the sound of their CI with simulations of the CI sound played to their nonimplanted ear.

Systematic review of compound action potentials as predictors for cochlear implant performance.

Objectives/hypothesis: The variability in speech perception between cochlear implant users is thought to result from the degeneration of the auditory nerve. Degeneration of the auditory nerve, histologically assessed, correlates with electrophysiologically acquired measures, such as electrically evoked compound action potentials (eCAPs) in experimental animals. To predict degeneration of the auditory nerve in humans, where histology is impossible, this paper reviews the correlation between speech perception and eCAP recordings in cochlear implant patients.

Delayed Auditory Brainstem Responses in Prelingually Deaf and Late-Implanted Cochlear Implant Users.

Neurophysiological studies in animals and humans suggest that severe hearing loss during early development impairs the maturation of the auditory brainstem. To date, studies in humans have mainly focused on the neural activation of the auditory brainstem in children treated with a cochlear implant (CI), but little is known about the pattern of activation in adult CI users with early onset of deafness (prelingual, before the age of 2 years). In this study, we compare auditory brainstem activation in prelingually deaf and late-implanted adult CI users to that in postlingually deaf CI users.