Key points
- The BCD is an important method of hearing intervention for patients
with single-sided deafness (SSD) who do not meet the surgical
indications.
- The BCD significantly improved the speech discrimination scores in
quiet for the paediatric SSD population.
- The BCD significantly decreased (became better) the speech reception
thresholds for children with SSD in the presence of speech-spectrum
noise masking that was either co-located with or spatially separated
from the target speech signals.
- For children with SSD, there was no statistical improvement in SRM
after using a BCD for a short time.
- For NH children, SRM continued to change during childhood.
Introduction
Single-sided deafness (SSD), the most severe form of unilateral
sensorineural hearing loss (USNHL), is defined as profound hearing loss
in the affected ear and normal hearing in the contralateral ear [1].
As the healthy ear was considered adequate for perceiving basic speech
in a quiet environment, the hearing problems are usually ignored in
these patients. Nowadays, an increasing body of research has shown that
due to the loss of binaural auditory input, patients with SSD might
struggle with auditory deficits in sound localisation, speech perception
and spatial release from masking (SRM) in noisy environments [2,3].
Current treatment options for children with SSD remain controversial.
The three common ones are cochlear implants (CI), contralateral routing
of signal (CROS), and bone conduction device (BCD) [4,5]. For
patients who do not meet the indications for cochlear implantation, such
as children with cochlear nerve deficiency (CND) or inner ear
abnormalities, BCDs are useful alternatives [6,7]. To date, little
is known about the characteristics of speech perception ability and SRM
for paediatric SSD patients who receive a non-invasive BCD. This study
aimed to primarily assess speech perception performance in a quiet
environment and in the presence of speech-spectrum noise (SSN) masking
that was either co-located with or spatially separated from the target
speech signals.