Postoperative results of children with congenital cytomegalovirus infection undergoing cochlear implantation.

Abstract

We evaluated the results of aided threshold, speech discrimination, language development, speech intelligibility and communication mode in 8 children with congenital cytomegalovirus infection (CMV) who underwent cochlear implantation (CI) at our hospital. Four of the 8 children had mental retardation (MR), one had pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and another had suspected PDD. All the children exhibited good aided thresholds. Two of the 8 children who did not have any psycho-neurological disorders showed good results in all the examinations. The speech discrimination scores of the four children with MR were good and these children showed progress in language development, although at a slow pace. Their speech intelligibility scores varied widely from clear to unintelligible. One of the children used spoken language, while the other three used total communication. In contrast, the child diagnosed as having PDD and the one with suspected PDD exhibited the poorest performances in all the postoperative evaluations. However, they showed improvement of the reaction to sound, recognized their names, and their vocalization in social interactions increased. Both the benefits and limitations of CI should be explained to the parents before deciding the surgical indications in pediatric CI candidates with congenital CMV infection and psycho-neurological disorders.