Listening-Related Fatigue in New and Experienced Adult Cochlear Implant Users.
Benjamin W Y Hornsby, Erin M Picou, Todd A Ricketts and 1 others
PMID 38379155WHAT IT FOUND
New cochlear implant users report a rapid drop in listening-related fatigue within two weeks of activation, stabilizing by three months.
However, fatigue remains significantly higher than in people without hearing loss. Audiograms do not predict fatigue levels; perceived hearing handicap and listening effort do.
Key findings
01Listening-related fatigue scores decreased significantly as early as two weeks after cochlear implant activation and continued to improve through two to three months, after which they remained stable up to one year.
02While implantation reduces fatigue, experienced cochlear implant users still report substantially higher fatigue (mean score ~70) than adults without hearing loss (median score 15.5), indicating fatigue remains a chronic issue.
03Objective audiologic measures like pure tone thresholds and speech recognition scores were not predictive of fatigue levels. Instead, subjective factors such as perceived hearing handicap and listening effort were the strongest predictors.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study excluded individuals with depression, sleep disorders, or other medical causes of fatigue, so the findings may not generalize to patients with comorbidities. There was no direct measurement of daily cochlear implant wear time, so it is unclear if fatigue changes were influenced by how much patients actually used the device. The control group completed surveys only twice, while the experimental group completed them up to seven times, which could introduce reporting bias. Speech recognition data were extracted from clinical records at varying times, not time-locked to the fatigue surveys.
Declared interests
The authors declared support from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA). No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a patient's poor hearing test scores explain their high fatigue. The study found that objective audiologic measures did not predict fatigue levels; instead, the patient's subjective perception of their handicap and effort was the determining factor.