Hearing rehabilitation with Baha® transcutaneous and percutaneous systems.

Purpose: Longitudinally verify the influence of auditory tonal thresholds obtained with transcutaneous and percutaneous bone-anchored hearing aids on speech perception in individuals with external and/or middle ear malformation and chronic otitis media.

Methods: Observational, retrospective, longitudinal follow-up study of 30 unilateral users of the transcutaneous and percutaneous Baha® system for the collection of secondary data on pure tone thresholds obtained through free field audiometry and sentence recognition threshold in silence and noise in conditions: without the prosthesis; at the time of activation; in the first month of use (post 1); and in the third month (post 2).

Results: There was a significant difference between pure tone thresholds obtained at frequencies of 3 and 4kHz with better results for the percutaneous technique at all evaluation moments.

Comparative analysis between effective gain and functional gain in bone-anchored hearing aid users.

Background: The cases of ear malformations, conductive, mixed, and single-sided deafness hearing loss are candidates for surgery and use of Bone-Anchored Hearing Aids (BAHA). Commonly, the literature highlights two procedures to assess the benefits and characteristics of amplification in users: functional gain (FG) and effective gain (EG).

Objective: Estimate and compare the EG and the FG to evaluate the benefits obtained by users of BAHA and, later, to compare tests of speech perception in silence and in noise.