It depends on the hearing recovery of elderly patients, brain health...Artificial Wow Transplantation Predictable
Mar 06, 2025
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Hearing loss is a common disease in the elderly population, and is associated with increased risk of depression and dementia as well as poor quality of life. Artificial wow transplantation is known as the most effective treatment for patients with high hearing loss, but there were many cases of hesitation or failure to expect good results due to old age. Above all, due to the characteristics of hearing, there is a lack of objective indicators to predict the success of surgery because each patient has individual differences.
Meanwhile, Bae Sung-hoon, an otolaryngologist at Yonsei University Gangnam Severance Hospital, and Kim Joon-yeop, a former rehabilitation medicine professor at Hanyang University Hospital, paid attention to the relationship between hearing and cerebellum.
Although the cerebellum is traditionally known to be primarily involved in motor function and balance maintenance, various studies have recently shown that the cerebellum can also affect cognitive functions such as language perception.
The research team looked at brain MRI before and after surgery on 52 artificial woo transplant patients aged 70 or older. The gray matter volume in the 'Crus I" region known to be related to speech function in the cerebellum was precisely measured, and then the correlation between Crus I gray matter volume and hearing was analyzed by testing monosyllabic, joint word, and sentence recognition.
As a result of the study, gray matter in the cerebellum Crus I site decreased and atrophy patients tended to have lower language recognition ability after surgery. Age had little effect on the outcome of artificial wow transplantation. In particular, it was also confirmed that the degree of atrophy of the cerebellum has a greater impact on the prognosis of surgery than the Duration of Deafness (DoD), which was previously considered important for predicting surgical outcome.
This study found that the success of artificial wow transplantation does not depend solely on the duration of hearing loss. The researchers note that it will be a new criterion for patient selection and prediction of surgical outcome as the possibility of successful artificial woo transplantation can be evaluated in advance.
Professor Bae Sung-hoon, the head of the research, said "In the future, we will be able to establish a patient-specific treatment plan by checking the condition of cerebellar Crus I through preoperative brain MRI. Age had little effect on the outcome of artificial wow surgery, so I hope elderly patients will consider active treatment with confidence" he said.
The study was carried out with the support of the Ministry of Science and ICT and was published in Scientific Reports, a sister journal of the international journal Nature.
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This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
