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New Hearing Aid Systems, Surgeries Available to Rehabilitate Single-Sided Deafness

by David Bronstein •

Still, some patients do reject the devices after implantation. Dr. Hol and her team have implanted more than 100 SSD patients with BAHAs over the past several years. “We recently asked them whether they are still using the device after a mean follow-up of five years and found that, on average, 17% of the patients are no longer using the devices. In a smaller group of patients we’ve followed for up to 10 years, the drop-out rate approaches 30%.”

Are those rates high? “It’s hard to say; there is very little published data on discontinuation of treatment in these patients,” Dr. Hol said. She added that the rate is partly due to a heterogenous patient mix: Some had congenital while others had acquired SSD, and the former group tends to judge hearing-aid interventions more critically because they already have developed considerable coping skills before being fitted.

Still, “that drop-out suggests to me that 10 years ago, perhaps we might have overlooked spcific items during pre-operative counseling of these patients about the benefits or expectations of BAHA in SSD. Or, we did not do enough pre-surgical trials of the hearing aids. We need to learn from that experience: These are very expensive devices, requiring fairly involved surgery and repeated adjusting and follow-up, to end up sitting on a shelf.”

David Bronstein is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.

Psychosocial Aspects of SSD

With so many high-tech hearing aid systems and surgeries available for managing patients with single-sided deafness (SSD), it’s easy to lose track of the human element when crafting an intervention strategy. “Certainly, take advantage of the technology, but also remember that there is a person in a psychosocial environment who is struggling with SSD,” said Dr. Baguley.

That holistic approach is Dr. Baguley’s preferred method for treating the 120 or so patients he sees each year with SSD and other forms of unilateral hearing loss. And it is a strategy that he says is rapidly gaining adherents. “We do a lot of teaching on this point, to make sure that our audiologist and otologist colleagues are equipped with knowledge about these psychosocial factors,” he said.

A common neglected strategy, he noted, is to counsel patients to advocate for themselves and ask for environmental aids in their work setting. Patients who have been fitted with a hearing aid, for example, can ask that a loop device be installed in a conference room. These environmental amplification systems can make a huge positive impact in an SSD patient’s ability to hear a colleague who is speaking on his or her deaf-ear side.