Bill Daniels Center For Children’s Hearing Uses the Latest Technology to Treat Hearing Loss In the Youngest Patients

from Practice Update, Fall 2005

Griffin and Cooper Seeley were

diagnosed with profound hearing

lossshortly after birth. Today,

Griffin , 5, andCooper, 3, are

activeand “quite talkative”with

excellent prognoses.

Brothers Griffin and Cooper Seeley were born profoundly deaf. A newborn hearing screening, using automated auditory brainstem response (A-ABR), an automated electrophysiologic test of auditory function, detected their hearing loss. At follow-up diagnostic evaluation at The Children’s Hospital, audiologists determined the degree and audiometric configuration of Griffin ’s and Cooper’s hearing loss using a battery of electrophysiologic and behavioral audiometric test procedures. At The Children’s Hospital, these procedures are routinely used with infants referred from newborn hearing screening or those babies at-risk for hearing loss who receive care in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit or infant care center. 

Because babies begin learning language through hearing in the earliest months of life, both Griffin and Cooper were fit with hearing aids at The Children’s Hospital by age three months. Today’s hearing aids are based on advanced digital technology; audiologists at Children’s program these aids to provide the optimal sound input customized to the child’s hearing loss. Griffin and Cooper and their parents also started parent-infant/parent-toddler programs for families of deaf and hard-of-hearing children at The Children’s Hospital. These supportive group programs teach families how to provide a sound and language-rich environment for their children. When Griffin and Cooper were about three years old, they received individual speech-language therapy at Children’s Therapy Center – Westminster to help them maintain language development commensurate with their normally-hearing peers.

Griffin , now five, responded well to his hearing aids from infancy. Cooper, now three, did not. “As soon as they turned on Griffin ’s hearing aids, he turned his head toward sounds,” their mother Karen says. “But there was no clear indication that Cooper heard anything.” Cooper’s hearing loss was more severe than Griffin ’s, and rapidly progressed to a profound hearing loss in early infancy.

While Griffin ’s language skills thrived using hearing aids, Cooper remained in his own world. When Cooper was 18 months old, his parents began exploring a new possibility for him: a cochlear implant. Cochlear implants consist of two components, an external sound processor and an internal electrode array inserted into the cochlea in close proximity to the eighth (auditory) nerve.  The external device contains a microphone, microcomputer that transforms speech into an electronic signal using specific algorithms, and a transmission coil to deliver the electronically-encoded speech across the skin to an internal receiver. The electrodes, activated sequentially and/or simultaneously depending on the speech processor program, deliver an electrical stimulus to the eighth nerve. Karen researched several centers in Denver that offer cochlear implants, but the family settled on Children’s because of its multidisciplinary cochlear implant care team including specialists in pediatric otolaryngology, audiology,  speech-language pathology and clinical social work. In April 2004, Cooper received the implant and the results, Karen says, were “like night and day.  Within a week, he was saying words. He’s just flourished.” About eight months later, Griffin ’s hearing loss also progressed and he obtained less benefit from hearing aids. In April 2005, Griffin also received a cochlear implant and, like Cooper, shows excellent detection of soft sounds and good discrimination of words, consonants and vowels.

Cooper continues once-weekly speech therapy at Children’s Therapy Center – Westminster , and Griffin now receives his therapy through the public schools.  Karen says she is grateful that Children’s is here for her kids. “The people are very supportive, she says. “They make you feel special, that they really care for your child. We know that when we go to the satellite clinic, the care will be the same as what we get at the hospital. It’s just perfect for what it is—a place for kids to get the help they need.”