النتائج السمعية و الكلامية لمرضى نقص السمع الشديد إلى العميق المستخدمين للمعينات السمعية

الملخص EN

Background & Objective: In most countries, cochlear implant (CI) is considered as the first choice in the management of children with severe to profound hearing loss (HL).

In our country, most of these children are managed by hearing aids (HAs) because of the high cost of CI operations.

The purpose of this study is to compare the auditory performance and speech intelligibility results of utilizing high power hearing aid in children with congenital severe to profound hearing loss with another Syrian study, that has approximately same criteria, in children utilizing cochlear implants.

Materials & Methods: A Case series study was conducted on children with congenital bilateral severe to profound HL who used one or two HAs.

The study was conducted on 62 children in two groups: the first group includes 33 childs whose Pure Tone Average (PTA) is between 85 dB HL in the better ear, the 99 - second group includes 29 child whose PTA ≥ 100 dB HL in the better ear.

The results were then gathered and organized according to the international standardization of auditory performance and speech intelligibility and study of audiogram results.

These results were then averaged and compared between the two groups and to those of the CI study.

Results: 32 Children (97%) of group 1 and 9 Children (31%) of group 2 have the aided PTA ≤ 50 dB HL in the better ear, and 20 Childs (69%) of group 2 have the Aided PTA > 50 dB HL in the better ear, 12 of them were with no response to HA(Vibration only).

The children group 1 performed better than group 2 in auditory performance and speech intelligibility and the results were approximately similar to those in the CI groups, however, the CI group performed better than group 2.

Conclusions: Most of the children with unaided PTA between 85-99 dB HL manifested a very good achievement in auditory performance and speech intelligibility and similar to the age matched in CI groups, however, the performance was not good for most children in group 2.

Because of the high cost of the CI operation in Syria and according to the international recommendation, we must utilize put HAs in all patients with severe to profound HL before taking a decision of CI, as a high percentage of children benefit from HAs.