Bilateral Cochlear Implantation in Children: Long-Term Outcome in the Adult Population With Special Emphasis on the Bilateral Benefit.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the benefit of bilateral cochlear implantation in adults, who had been implanted being a child under the age of 10 years. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective data analysis. SETTING Tertiary referral center with a large cochlear implant program. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Speech understanding in the Freiburg monosyllabic words in quiet and the HSM sentence test in quiet and in background noise. PATIENTS Seventy-seven bilaterally cochlear implantation implanted adults. RESULTS Bilateral cochlear implantation in children under the age of 10 years results in a significant benefit in speech comprehension in adulthood. In addition, a dependency regarding the time between the implantations and speech intelligibility was found. CONCLUSION The results emphasize the benefit of bilateral cochlear implantation with a short interval between the operations in young children not only during formative years but also in adulthood.