Bilateral cochlear implantation: simultaneous versus sequential

• Main Authors: Reham Elrashidy, Ahmed Mohamed Khater, Mohmad Shabana, Ahmed Khashaba, Adel Tharwat
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-09-01
• Series: The Egyptian Journal of Otolaryngology
• Subjects: Bilateral cochlear implantation; Simultaneous cochlear implant; Sequential cochlear implant
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s43163-020-00015-3

Abstract Background Bilateral cochlear implantation (BiCI) has been provided with an intent to promote binaural hearing and improve quality of life (QoL). Binaural hearing maximum benefit could be optimized with BiCI, when indicated in the early stages of life through preserving the cortical hearing development. Actually, BiCI benefits wide variables among patients, and in this work, we aimed to analyze the benefit of bilateral cochlear implantation over unilateral and the simultaneous over sequential implantation in peri- and post-lingual patients. The analysis based on common clinically used audiological tests such as aided hearing threshold and speech perception measures. Results The results of the aided threshold and speech perception measures in all patients revealed a significantly better response in the bilateral implantations than in unilateral each implant separately. Overall, the best response was seen in the simultaneous bilateral group followed by sequential bilateral groups. In post-lingual patients, a better response was observed in sequential and similar bilateral than in sequential and different device groups with significant differences. Change of performance across time revealed aided threshold improvement of the from 3 to 6 months. In speech perception measures, the post-lingual group revealed significant improvement of high-context sentence test (HCST) scores from 3 to 6 months and 12 months. In the peri-lingual group, Early Speech Perception test (ESPT) revealed a change in performance with time at 3, 6, and 12 months. In addition, the simultaneous patient’s scores were significantly better than sequential similar patient’s scores. Conclusion The main finding of our study was that bilateral cochlear implants (BiCI) are better than unilateral cochlear implant, and simultaneous BiCI is preferred than the sequential cochlear implant even after escaping the early stage of language development.