Pre-, Per- and Postoperative Factors Affecting Performance of Postlinguistically Deaf Adults Using Cochlear Implants: A New Conceptual Model over Time

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Funding Acknowledgements

DL was funded by Fondation Bettencourt-Schueller. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No additional external funding was received for this study. Most of the authors of this paper are involved in the purchase and application of cochlear implants from one or more of the four largest manufacturers (Advanced Bionics, Cochlear Limited, Med-El, and Neurelec). Peter Blamey is a co-inventor of technologies used in the device manufactured by Cochlear Limited and formerly received a share of royalties from the University of Melbourne. He is not a shareholder in Cochlear and no longer receives royalties. The hearing aid company, Blamey & Saunders Hearing Pty Ltd, regularly refers people with severe-to-profound hearing loss to cochlear implant clinics whenever it seems likely that a CI will provide a better clinical outcome than a HA. The Bionics Institute has a small shareholding in Cochlear Limited. DL received travel support from Cochlear in 2010/11. Neurelec partially funded her PhD work in 2009/10, but was not involved in the research project (fMRI). This dataset is a very rare resource enabling comparison of different devices from different manufacturers and from different cochlear implant clinics and the data analysts (Blamey and Lazard) designed the study and analysis in a way that treats data for these different devices equivalently to avoid any possibility of bias. Statistically significant differences between the device brands were found in the analysis, and the device brands have been de-identified in the manuscript to avoid use of the data for commercial advantage. This has been a difficult decision because de-identification of the brands is also withholding important information about clinical outcomes from potential patients and clinicians. The authors agree to share the (de-identified) data on request for academic, non-commercial purposes if the paper is published. Salome Fontolliet (Faculte de medecine, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada), Assia Terranti (Service d'otologie et d'otoneurologie, Hopital R.-Salengro, CHRU de Lille, Lille, France), Alexandra Rousset (Department of Otolaryngology, The University of Melbourne Cochlear Implant Clinic, The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, Melbourne, Australia), Isabelle Mosnier (AP-HP, Hopital Beaujon, Service d'ORL et Chirurgie Cervico-Faciale, Clichy, France), Stephane Gallego (Hospices Civils de Lyon, Hopital Edouard Herriot, Departement d'ORL, de Chirurgie Cervico-Maxillo-Faciale et d'Audiophonologie, Lyon, France), Mathieu Marx (Hopital Universitaire Purpan, Service d'ORL et Chirurgie Cervico-Faciale, Toulouse, France), Alec Fitzgerald O' Connor (St Thomas' Hospital, Auditory Implants Department, London, United Kingdom) are acknowledged for their contribution in collecting a great amount of data. The Bionics Institute acknowledges the support it receives from the Victorian Government through its Operational Infrastructure Support Program.