A FOLLOW-UP-STUDY OF LONG-TERM RESULTS AFTER COCHLEAR IMPLANTATION INCHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

The time course of speech development in children after cochlear impla ntation may extend over many years, thus making long-term studies nece ssary to evaluate any outcome. We report our long-term results after c ochlear implantation in children and adolescents. Mean follow-up was 2 8 months, ranging from 1 to 5 years. After at least I year of experien ce all children were found to benefit from their cochlear implants. Th e majority of children scored above chance in speech identifcation tas ks requiring closed set word and sentence understanding). At the 4-yea r interval, all children tested including prelingually deaf children h ad developed open set sentence understanding. The most relevant factor accounting for differences in the results was the duration of implant use in all groups. Even beyond 3 years the results continued to impro ve. Peri- or postlinguallly deafened children tended to have favorable results. For prelingually deaf children, duration of deafness and age at implantation were correlated negatively with the results.