KTP‐laser stapedotomy with a self‐crimping, thermal shape memory Nitinol SMart piston: 1 year follow‐up results: how we do it

• We evaluate the long-term speech perception results in 12 children with bilateral large vestibular aqueduct syndrome, who received cochlear implantation as the treatment. The mean duration of implant usage was 4.8 years. The performance of cochlear implantation in the originally poorer hearing ear is compared to that of the contralateral better hearing ear using a hearing aid after at least 3 years of follow-up. • Speech perception measures included a Mandarin closed-set consonant discrimination test, a closed-set tone identification test, two open-set sentence recognition tests and an open-set word identification test. These tests were carried out with live voice in a sound-proofed room. • The median scores of the five speech perception tests were 80%, 75%, 97%, 91.5% and 86% respectively for the implanted ears. For the opposite ear with hearing aids, the median scores were 35%, 40%, 11%, 8% and 10% respectively. In all five tests, the results were statistically significantly higher in the implanted ear. • Our results confirmed that cochlear implantation is an effective treatment for subjects with large vestibular aqueduct syndrome once their hearing deteriorated to the profound level. Moreover, we have shown that the long-term speech perception results are significantly better in ears with cochlear implantation than the contralateral ear using hearing aids. Conflict of interest