Normative Cochlear Implant Quality of Life (CIQOL)-35 Profile and CIQOL-10 Global Scores for Experienced Cochlear Implant Users from a Multi-Institutional Study.

Objective: Although adult cochlear implant (CI) outcomes have primarily focused on speech recognition scores, the rigorous development of a CI-specific patient-reported outcome measure provides an opportunity for a more comprehensive and ecologically valid approach to measure the real-world functional abilities of adult CI users. Here, we report for the first time normative Cochlear Implant Quality of Life (CIQOL)-35 Profile and global scores and variance for a large, multi-institutional sample of adult CI users.

Study Design: Cross-sectional study design.

Setting: CI centers in the United States.

Patients: Seven hundred five adults with bilateral moderate to profound hearing loss with at least 1 year of CI use.

Interventions: Cochlear implantation.

Main Outcome Measures: CIQOL-35 Profile and CIQOL-10 Global scores.

Results: During the development of the CIQOL instruments, 1,000 CI users from all regions of the United States were invited to participate in studies. Of these, 705 (70.5%) completed all portions of the study, and their data are reported here. Mean CIQOL domain scores were highest (indicating better function) for the emotional and social domains and lowest for listening effort. The entertainment and social domains demonstrated the widest distribution of scores and largest standard deviations, indicating greatest variability in function. Overall, there were minimal ceiling and floor effects for all domains.

Conclusion: Normative scores from a large sample of experienced adult CI users are consistent with clinical observations, showing large differences in functional abilities and large variability. Normative CIQOL data for adult CI users have the potential to enhance preoperative discussions with CI candidates, improve post-CI activation monitoring, and establish standards for CI centers.