Postlingually Deafened Adult Cochlear Implant Users With Prolonged Recovery From Neural Adaptation at the Level of the Auditory Nerve Tend to Have Poorer Speech Perception Performance.
Shuman He, Jeffrey Skidmore, Brittney L Carter and 2 others
PMID 35652833WHAT IT FOUND
Cochlear implant users who take longer to recover from nerve adaptation tend to have poorer speech perception.
This recovery speed explained about 15% of the difference in word scores. Other nerve measures showed no clear link to performance.
Key findings
01Slower recovery from neural adaptation was associated with lower speech perception scores in both quiet and noise.
02The speed of adaptation recovery accounted for 14.1% of variability in word scores in quiet and 16.7% in noise, but these results were not statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
03Measures of the amount of neural adaptation and the amount of adaptation recovery did not show a robust relationship with speech perception performance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 18 participants (22 ears), which limits the generalizability of the findings. The associations between recovery speed and speech scores did not reach statistical significance, so the clinical utility of this measure is uncertain. The study focused only on postlingually deafened adults, so results may not apply to children or those deafened before language acquisition. Several participants with normal recovery speeds had poor speech scores, indicating that this measure is not sufficient to predict performance on its own.
Declared interests
The study was supported by NIH extramural funding. The authors used commercial software and devices from Cochlear Ltd., but no specific conflicts of interest regarding the company's involvement in the study design or analysis were declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that measuring auditory nerve recovery speed can predict a patient's speech perception outcome. The relationship was not statistically significant, and many patients with normal recovery speeds still performed poorly on word recognition tests.