Hearing performance of cochlea-implanted patients in noise

The aim of the study was to evaluate the speech discrimination ability of p ostlingually deaf adults implanted with the Combi 40 cochlear implant in no ise and to compare the results with the speech discrimination ability of pa tients provided with hearing aids. The 12-month postoperative hearing perfo rmance of 12 consecutive patients was tested using a sentence discriminatio n test in quiet and noise. The results of the present study demonstrate tha t all patients obtained substantial benefit from their implants even in sit uations coupled with noise. The speech understanding of cochlea-implanted p atients appears to be better than that of patients provided with hearing ai ds. Very high scores (mean, 40.2%) were achieved at a signal-noise ratio of 15 dB.