Vibrant Soundbridge can improve the most comfortable listening level in sensorineural hearing loss: our experience of 61 patients

Abstract

In auditory rehabilitation, the most comfortable listening level (MCL) is important because the conversation partners of patients with hearing impairment are often individuals with normal hearing. Thus, normalizing MCL can help patients with hearing loss to reduce the communication handicap with individuals with normal hearing.

While active middle ear implants demonstrate comparable performance with conventional hearing aids (HA) with regard to functional hearing gain and speech intelligibility, little is known about the effect of middle ear implants on the MCL. Therefore, we evaluated the MCL of active middle-ear implants compared with that of conventional HA in patients with moderate and moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL).

We found that the Vibrant Soundbridge (VSB) active middle-ear implant had a pure-tone threshold similar to conventional HA. However, the MCL in VSB-aided conditions was significantly lower (by ~10 dB) than for HA-aided conditions. In addition, the significant improvement in MCL was attributable to robust amplifications at 1 kHz and 2 kHz compared with conventional HA.

VSB implantation nearly normalized MCL for patients with SNHL. In terms of normalizing MCL, VSB implantation is a good choice for hearing rehabilitation in patients with SNHL.

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