Assessing the Relationship Between the Electrically Evoked Compound Action Potential and Speech Recognition Abilities in Bilateral Cochlear Implant Recipients.
Kara C Schvartz-Leyzac, Bryan E Pfingst
PMID 28885234WHAT IT FOUND
In bilateral cochlear implant users, the ear with a larger electrical response change when pulse spacing was lengthened generally had better sentence recognition, and consonant recognition showed a similar ear-to-ear relationship.
It did not predict scores for different patients in a basic across-patient analysis.
Key findings
01Within each person, ear differences in the increase in ECAP slope when the interphase gap was lengthened from 7 to 30 μs were significantly related to ear differences in sentence recognition in noise.
02A similar ear-to-ear relationship was found for consonant recognition.
03When all 20 ears were analyzed together in a simple regression, the increase in ECAP slope was not significantly related to sentence recognition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 10 bilateral cochlear implant recipients were studied, so the findings are limited to a small group and cannot establish a general clinical rule. The analysis tested many ECAP measures and speech conditions, and most ECAP-speech relationships were not significant; only one ECAP measure showed a within-ear association. The expected pattern across ECAP measures was inconsistent: only three subjects showed a clear same-ear pattern. Electrodes could not be assessed for 11% of ECAP conditions, mostly the most basal electrodes, so some cochlear regions were missing. The measure was not significantly related to sentence recognition in a simple across-ear analysis, although a mixed model found a relationship with large subject variability. A subject did not complete the vowels-in-noise condition.
Declared interests
The authors report no relevant conflicts of interest. The paper is listed as supported by NIH extramural research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that this electrical response measure can now be used to predict speech recognition across patients or to select electrodes for activation. The significant result was mainly an ear-to-ear comparison within the same person, and the simple across-ear analysis was not significant.