Article appeared in the newspaper on March 19,2002, the source was the Associated Press. |
Plagued by poor hearing since her teens, Burk never wore a hearing aid because she felt self-conscious wearing the usually clunky object. Illness and factory work gradually made her hearing worse, she said, but doctors could never persuade this 58-year-old from Greensburg to wear a hearing aid.
But this spring, doctors at Allegheny General Hospital activated an experimental hearing aid completely implanted inside the ears of Burk and three other patients from western Pennsylvania.
Burk and another patient Conrad Hart, 66, of Pittsburgh, since have reported a remarkable improvement in their hearing.
Considering that the four patients are the first people in the nation to receive the completely implantable hearing restoration system, the results are promising, said Dr. Moises Arriaga, a co-director at Allegheny General’s Hearing and Balance Center. “This tells me that the technology makes sense, it works and we’re still on the learning curve,” Arriaga said Monday. “Those two folks are very encouraging. It tells us the technology can successfully help when even the best-fitting hearing aids aren’t working.
The two other patients, a 73 year-old man from Wabash and a 63-yea old man from Johnstown, had problems with their implants. Doctors made adjustments to their devices and are waiting for patients to heal before they reactivate the aids.
Doctors at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh and Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle are studying the device on 10 people.
The four patients received their implants in the beginning of March, but had to wait weeks while they healed before doctors could activate the devices and study their effectiveness.
A fifth person in western Pennsylvania will receive the implant at the end of July.
The Device could improve the hearing of those people who suffer from mild to sever sensorineural hearing loss, or about 10 million people in the country.
These people are traditionally helped by external hearing aids that use microphones that can pick up sound from many sources. They force wearers, however, to decipher background noises from conversations of things they want to hear.
Hart, a retired auto mechanic who received his implant in March and had it activated in May, said it was nearly impossible for him to carry on a conversation with his wife at a restaurant when he used a conventional hearing aid. “I’m the secretary of my Masonic lodge and now I don’t have to tape every meeting because I cant follow the conversation,” Hart said. “ People really got tired of me saying ‘huh’ and ‘what’ all of the time”
The implant uses the eardrum and its natural acoustics as its microphone and the input signals are identical to those received by a person with normal hearing.
Written by Allison Schlesinger, published in The Times/Beaver Newspapers Inc., Pennsylvania on Tuesday, June 25, 2002.
