Relationship of intraoperative electrically evoked stapedius reflex thresholds to maximum comfortable loudness levels of children with cochlear implants

Abstract

Previous studies of the relationship between the intraoperatively obtained electrically evoked stapedius reflex threshold (ESRT) and the maximum comfortable loudness (MCL) values used to program the speech processor of cochlear implant (CI) patients have indicated that ESRTs provide an inexact estimate of MCL. In order to determine whether this estimate might be more exact for electrodes in different parts of the electrode array, we studied the electrode-specific relationships between ESRT and MCL in 29 Med-E1 Combi 40+ and 25 Nucleus CI 24 M patients after first fitting of the speech processor and 2 and 6 months later. The MCL values were mostly less than the ESRT values, but increased progressively over the first 6 months, reaching 83% and 72% of the ESRT values, on average, across all electrodes for the Med-E1 and Nucleus systems respectively. The population variation across electrodes decreased over the 6-month observation period and was least for the apical half of the array, for which the correlation coefficients of regressions between ESRT and MCL were around 0.65 for both systems. These results indicate that estimates of MCL values from the ERST are more accurate for the apical half of the intra-cochlear array and could then be described by an offset value plus an increase of MCL by 0.62 and 0.53 of ESRT for the Med-E1 and Nucleus systems, respectively.