CHENNAI: When a 20-year-old man from Erode turned whenever someone called his name but couldn’t respond to their speech, people thought he was pretending. Only after being brought to the doctors at the Madras ENT Research Foundation, they diagnosed he had auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, a hearing condition where the inner ear detects sound but struggles to send the signals effectively to the brain, leading to poor speech understanding despite potentially normal or near normal hearing.
What doctors at the Madras ENT Research Foundation (MERF) performed was for the first time bilateral simultaneous hearing and structure preservation (HSP) surgery on him.
Speaking to the press on Wednesday, Dr Mohan Kameswaran, director and chief ENT surgeon, Madras ENT Research Foundation said, during the cochlear implant normal hair cells are damaged, but these cells are preserved in HSP. The procedure might be performed using robotics in the future, and it’s helpful for customised medicine. HSP is suitable for persons with partial deafness and auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder.
The hospital is also providing training on HSP in all government medical colleges in the state. It also provides training on paediatric auditory brainstem implants.
The hospital has performed hearing and structure preservation surgery on five patients in the last one year. The procedure involves inserting a cochlear implant along with hearing structure preservation, a process that preserves natural hearing while using the cochlear implant to salvage the damaged hearing, he added.
A person receiving a cochlear implant with hearing structure preservation will have electric hearing (bionic hearing), and natural hearing (biological hearing) in the same ear. This is called electro-acoustic stimulation (EAS) hearing. The quality of sound and speech perception is richer in EAS than in conventional cochlear implant, Dr Mohan Kameswaran said.
The hospital also celebrated the completion of 100 paediatric auditory brainstem implants. The paediatric auditory brainstem implants can be performed on children who are born without cochlear auditory nerves. So, the device is directly connected to the brain steam nerves, doctors added.