Speech recognition in elderly cochlear implant recipients.

The benefits of cochlear implantation in the adult and paediatric populations are well established. Cochlear implantation in the geriatric population still remains controversial because of the misconception that elderly patients might perform poorly. The purpose of this study was to report the speech performance of 16 patients over 65 years of age implanted with a Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant and to compare it with that of a control group of 14 adults aged between 41 and 59 years. At the 12 months postoperative evaluation, no significant differences were detected on speech performances between the elderly patients and the control group. The mean word recognition scores were 72.5% for the elderly group and 82% for the control group. The mean everyday sentence recognition scores were 72.5% for the elderly group and 85.7% for the control group. Overall, the results are encouraging and demonstrate that the elderly population with profound hearing loss obtain significant benefits from cochlear implantation despite the age-related auditory processing problems.