Comparison of the benefits of cochlear implantation versus contra-lateral routing of signal hearing aids in adult patients with single-sided deafness: study protocol for a prospective within-subject…

Pádraig T Kitterick, Gerard M O’Donoghue, Mark Edmondson-Jones, Andrew Marshall, Ellen Jeffs, Louise Craddock, Alison Riley, Kevin Green, Martin O’Driscoll, Dan Jiang, Terry Nunn, Shakeel Saeed, Wanda Aleksy, Bernhard U Seeber

Individuals with a unilateral severe-to-profound hearing loss, or single-sided deafness, report difficulty with listening in many everyday situations despite having access to well-preserved acoustic hearing in one ear. The standard of care for single-sided deafness available on the UK National Health Service is a contra-lateral routing of signals hearing aid which transfers sounds from the impaired ear to the non-impaired ear. This hearing aid has been found to improve speech understanding in noise when the signal-to-noise ratio is more favourable at the impaired ear than the non-impaired ear. However, the indiscriminate routing of signals to a single ear can have detrimental effects when interfering sounds are located on the side of the impaired ear. Recent published evidence has suggested that cochlear implantation in individuals with a single-sided deafness can restore access to the binaural cues which underpin the ability to localise sounds and segregate speech from other interfering sounds.