jillio
I did find that the article that mention about preserving some residual hearing with a standard electrode array. Below is part of the article and the full article can be found here.
Hearing Preservation in Patients With a Cochlear Implant
But even so you still going to lose more of your residual hearing 15db in this case and even with the hybrid it can be total. My point is that getting the cochlear implant should still be view as losing all your residual hearing.
Options for Hearing Preservation
by René H. Gifford and Jon K. Shallop
"Hearing preservation with a cochlear implant is also possible with a conventional long electrode array. It had been assumed that any residual hearing in the implanted ear would be sacrificed due to surgical trauma; however, in some instances, this is no longer the case. Increasingly skilled surgeons employing soft surgical techniques—which may include a smaller cochleostomy or round window insertion and more careful electrode insertion—with thinner electrode arrays and/or perimodiolar electrodes (which also may allow for a relatively atraumatic cochlear insertion) have all helped contribute to hearing preservation with standard cochlear implants.
In the past, cochlear implant patients typically had little or no measurable hearing preoperatively, but today many cochlear implant candidates have significant residual hearing, making hearing preservation possible. Balkany et al. (2006) reported measurable acoustic hearing in 28 standard, perimodiolar cochlear implant recipients, demonstrating a mean change of 15 dB in the pure-tone average (250, 500, and 1000 Hz) and resulting in a mean postoperative pure-tone average of 114 dB HL. At Mayo Clinic in Rochester, six implant recipients (four adults and two children) were implanted with a standard long-electrode device, but in retrospect were generally found to meet the audiologic criteria for an EAS or hybrid device (Gifford et al., 2007). These six individuals demonstrated hearing preservation in the implanted ear that rivals short-electrode EAS or hybrid recipients (see Figure 2 at right).
Yet another variation of EAS is the standard cochlear implant recipient who combines electric hearing with contralateral aided acoustic hearing, commonly referred to as bimodal listening. Though most would not group bimodal listeners into the category of hearing preservation, they are certainly combining the electric and acoustic perception, albeit across ears."
!!! I too believe that one needs to experiences whats it like to have a CI instead of creating this thread telling us we're wasting our time with hearing aids...
That what I thought that too :roll:
