A Los Angeles team of scientists and surgeons from Keck Medicine of USC, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), and Huntington Medical Research Institutes reports that sound registering in the brain of a deaf Canadian boy for the first time after doctors activated a hearing device that had been surgically implanted in his brainstem.
Auguste Majkowski, a three year old boy is the first child in the U.S to undergo an Auditory Brainstem Implant (ABI) surgery in a FDA approved trial supported by a NIH clinical trial grant. On June 12, six weeks after surgery at CHLA, the device was activated with positive results at the Department of Otolaryngology in their Head and Neck Surgery Clinic at Keck Medicine of USC.
The surgery’s device activation and future behavioral study are part of a five year clinical trial in which 10 devices will be implanted in deaf children under the age of 5 and studied over the course of three years.
Auguste has been deaf since birth. At 22 months, he underwent a bilateral cochlear implant, that uses electrodes to stimulate auditory nerves, but the device didn’t help him hear because he doesn’t have a cochlear or hearing nerve.
The ABI device has external and internal parts. The external part with a processor and a microphone and transmitter is able to transform sound into electrical signals and transmit these signals to an internal receiver that is part of the electrode array that is placed on the cochlear nucleus of the brainstem.
The young children who have had ABIs implanted outside the U.S. now have the potential to understand speech, but in the U.S., the device is FDA approved for use only in patients 12 years or older with neurofibromatosis type II, an inherited disease that causes a non-malignant brain tumor on the hearing nerve.
Scientists believe that the device would be more effective in young children when their brains are more adaptable. The clinical trial will attempt to prove that this surgery is safe in young children and allow researchers to study how the brain develops over time and how it learns to hear sound and develop speech.
For more information, go to http://keck.usc.edu.