BACKGROUND Streptococcus pneumoniae can cause life-threatening illness, with invasive pneumococcal diseases (IPD) like meningitis, sepsis, bacteremic pneumonia, and bacteremia being major causes of morbidity and mortality. Studies have shown that patients who have had a cochlear implant, particularly children, have an increased risk of bacterial (pneumococcal) meningitis. Vaccination in patient...

BACKGROUND Annually an estimated 223 children in the UK are born with or acquire permanent profound bilateral deafness (PBHL >or= 95 dB). These children may gain little or no benefit from acoustic hearing aids. However, cochlear implants might enable them to hear. OBJECTIVES OF THE REVIEW To bring together the diverse research in this area under the rigor of a systematic review to discover th...

Children with profound deafness are at risk for serious reading difficulties. Multiple factors affect their development of reading skills, including use of cochlear implants. Further, multiple factors influence the overall success that children experience with their cochlear implants. These factors include the age at which they receive an implant, method of communication, vocabulary skills, pre...

There are significant challenges to restoring binaural hearing to children who have been deaf from an early age. The uncoordinated and poor temporal information available from cochlear implants distorts perception of interaural timing differences normally important for sound localization and listening in noise. Moreover, binaural development can be compromised by bilateral and unilateral audito...

CONTEXT Prior clinical studies have indicated that cochlear implantation provides benefits to individuals with advanced sensorineural hearing loss who are unable to gain effective speech recognition with hearing aids. OBJECTIVE To determine the cost per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) for adults receiving multichannel cochlear implants. DESIGN Prospective 12-month multicenter study using ...

OBJECTIVE Grammatical development is shown to be delayed in CI children. However, the literature has focussed mainly on one aspect of grammatical development, either morphology or syntax, and on standard tests instead of spontaneous speech. The aim of the present study was to compare grammatical development in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with cochlear implants and normally...

We examined sensory-processing disorder (SPD) in children with cochlear implants and explored the relationship between SPD and duration of hearing loss or duration of cochlear implant use. Caregivers of 30 children completed the Sensory Profile Questionnaire (SPQ). Seventy percent of the children showed "at-risk" or "different" behaviors in one or more of five categories of the SPQ: auditory, v...