OBJECTIVES 1. To investigate whether systematic preservation of the intact ossicular chain in cholesteatoma surgery provides better hearing than dismantling the chain and reconstructing it. 2. To determine whether systematic preservation of the ossicular chain in cholesteatoma surgery can be performed safely. STUDY DESIGN Longitudinal parallel group study. SETTING District general hospital ...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES The standard surgical technique for osseointegrated hearing aids involves removing a large area of subcutaneous tissue down to the periosteum. Recently, the industry has designed a new range of abutment lengths for less invasive surgery with soft tissue preservation. This study compared and evaluated the complications in the standard and the tissue preservation techn...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS This study was designed to evaluate hearing preservation after gamma knife radiosurgery (GKRS) and to determine the relation between hearing preservation and cochlear radiation dose in patients with a sporadic vestibular schwannoma (VS). METHODS Prospective study involving patients suffering from VS who received GKRS from June 2003 until November 2007. Pure tone and spee...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess the benefit of having preserved acoustic hearing in the implanted ear for speech recognition in complex listening environments. DESIGN The present study included a within-subjects, repeated-measures design including 21 English-speaking and 17 Polish-speaking cochlear implant (CI) recipients with preserved acoustic hearing in the implanted ear. The...

OBJECTIVE The vestibular implant seems feasible as a clinically useful device in the near future. However, hearing preservation during intralabyrinthine implantation remains a challenge. It should be preserved to be able to treat patients with bilateral vestibulopathy and (partially) intact hearing. This case study investigated the feasibility of hearing preservation during the acute phase afte...

OBJECT The goal of this study was to define tumor control and complications of radiosurgery encountered using current treatment methods for the initial management of patients with unilateral acoustic neuroma. METHODS One hundred ninety patients with previously untreated unilateral acoustic neuromas (vestibular schwannomas) underwent gamma knife radiosurgery between 1992 and 1997. The median f...

OBJECTIVE Surgery for vestibular schwannoma may reduce patients' quality of life, but the effect of hearing preservation on this process is not fully understood. Our aim was to determine whether hearing preservation makes a difference to patients' quality of life in this clinical setting. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective questionnaire and cross-sectional survey. METHODS The study included 104 con...

Introduction Labyrinthectomy and vestibular neurectomy are considered the surgical procedures with the highest possibility of controlling medically untreatable incapacitating vertigo. Ironically, after 100 years of the introduction of both transmastoid labyrinthectomy and vestibular neurectomy, the choice of which procedure to use rests primarily on the evaluation of the hearing and of the surg...

Hearing loss is the most frequent sensory disorder in humans. Auditory hair cells (HCs) are postmitotic at late-embryonic differentiation and postnatal stages, and their damage is the major cause of hearing loss. There is no measurable HC regeneration in the mammalian cochlea, and the maintenance of cell function is crucial for preservation of hearing. Here we generated mice deficient in autoph...

Cochlear implants are a new surgical option in the hearing rehabilitation of patients with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) and patients with vestibular schwannoma (VS) in the only hearing ear. Auditory brainstem implant (ABI) has been the standard surgical treatment for these patients. We performed a literature review of patients with NF2 and patients with VS in the only hearing ear. Cochlear im...