Developmental Trajectories and Influencing Factors of Aural/Oral Performance in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants Using the PEACH Scale.

Children with severe inner ear malformations (other than enlarged vestibular aqueduct), auditory neuropathy, cochlear nerve deficiency, autism or cerebral palsy were excluded, so the trajectories described here do not apply to those children. Most children (60.4%) had a unilateral implant, which the authors attribute largely to the cost for families at the time of recruitment; results may not carry over to children with bilateral implants or a cochlear implant plus hearing aid. Documentation of hearing aid use before implantation was incomplete, which the authors say may have biased the analysis of what predicts PEACH scores. Hearing loss aetiology, especially genetic causes, was poorly characterised, so its contribution could not be examined. Children used a range of implant models from different manufacturers with different programming parameters, and the authors note this may affect outcomes. Children were grouped by the age at which they were implanted rather than assigned to it, so the age groups are not a randomised comparison and other differences between them could contribute to the gaps seen. All data come from a single hospital in China, and confidence intervals on the group estimates are wide (for example, the 95% confidence interval for the estimated marginal means of the five groups spans 30.84 to 62.50).

Funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the Beijing Nova Program (grant numbers 2023YFF1203504 and 20250484804). The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The paper names the implant manufacturers used by the participants but does not say whether any manufacturer was involved in the design, conduct or writing of the study.

Do not use this as a prediction for an individual child. It is a single-centre review of records, not a randomised comparison, and the group averages vary widely around the estimates. Children with severe inner ear malformations, auditory neuropathy, cochlear nerve deficiency, autism or cerebral palsy were excluded, so these trajectories do not describe them.