Brain plasticity under cochlear implant stimulation.

Facial Nerve Stimulation in Cochlear Implant Patients

Visual activation of auditory cortex reflects maladaptive plasticity in cochlear implant users.

Cross-modal reorganization in the auditory cortex has been reported in deaf individuals. However, it is not well understood whether this compensatory reorganization induced by auditory deprivation recedes once the sensation of hearing is partially restored through a cochlear implant. The current study used electroencephalography source localization to examine cross-modal reorganization in the a...

Cochlear implants and brain plasticity.

Cochlear implants have been implanted in over 110,000 deaf adults and children worldwide and provide these patients with important auditory cues necessary for auditory awareness and speech perception via electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve (AN). In 1942, Woolsey and Walzl presented the first report of cortical responses to localised electrical stimulation of different sectors of the AN...

Cochlear implants stimulate activity-dependent CREB pathway in the deaf auditory cortex: implications for molecular plasticity induced by neural prosthetic devices.

Neural activity modulates the maturation of synapses and their organization into functional circuits by regulating activity-dependent signaling pathways. Phosphorylation of cyclic AMP/Ca(2+)-responsive element-binding protein (CREB) is widely accepted as a stimulus-inducible event driven by calcium influx into depolarized neurons. In turn, phosphorylated CREB (pCREB) activates the transcription...

Changing Considerations for Cochlear Implant Candidacy: Age, Hearing Level and Auditory Neuropathy

The first child fitted with a cochlear implant was a ten year old boy of who received a single channel device from Dr. William House in 1980 (Eisenberg and House 1982; Eisenberg, Berliner, Thielemeir, Kirk and Tiber 1983). At that time the controversy over the safety and general wisdom of providing children with cochlear implants was raging. Prominent physicians and audiologists at the time, fe...