Impact of Music Therapy on Speech Intelligibility in Noise With Cochlear Implants

Armina Kreuzer

Status: Enrolling

Conditions: Music Therapy After Cochlear Implantation

Treatments: Other: no music therapy after Cochlear Implantation; Other: music therapy after Cochlear Implantation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06734897

Musiktherapie_Erwachsene

Details and patient eligibility

About

The aim of this clinical study is to investigate whether six months of music therapy immediately after CI implantation helps to improve speech intelligibility in noise. To investigate the effect of music therapy, a randomized study will be conducted with a "start group A" and a "delayed group" B (control group 1). Group A will start six months of music therapy immediately after cochlear implantation, group B six months later. A further control group 2 will not receive any music therapy. The speech intelligibility values resulting from the OLSA sentence test will be compared between the three groups after six and twelve months.

Full description

Improved speech perception is a main objective for any hearing rehabilitation using hearing devices. Even more challenging is speech comprehension in noisy environments.

Music therapy is one of the approaches that can assist users with achieving better performance in situations of difficult listening comprehension such as speech perception in noisy environments. One such music therapy concept developed in Heidelberg is based on the parallelism of language and music, whereby targeted training using musical parameters such as rhythm, pitch and timbre can have an impact on the ability to perceive speech. At present, the fact that music therapy can help improve speech intelligibility is primarily based on research with normal hearing listeners.

Nowadays, cochlear implant technology has the primary goal to restore functional hearing and speech perception in people with bilateral severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. Good results will be achieved by post lingually deafened CI users regarding the understanding of open-set sentences presented in quiet. But our surroundings are rarely quiet. Therefore, the goal of good rehabilitation must be to ensure that CI users also can cope well in our noisy environment. Music therapy is thus intended to be the crucial piece in the puzzle that enables such understanding in noisy situations.

This study aims to investigate the benefits of music therapy for cochlear implant users in terms of their speech intelligibility performance in noise. This is an explorative study to determine suitable parameters such as the time point of starting the music.

Enrollment: 30 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 85 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

1. Patient aged between 18-85 years
2. Patients who undergo a new CI Implantation
3. Patients who speak German as their main language

Exclusion criteria

1. Patients with congenital deafness

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

30 participants in 3 patient groups

Group A

Experimental group

Description:

Group A will begin six months of music therapy immediately after cochlear implantation.

Treatment:

Other: music therapy after Cochlear Implantation

Group B

Experimental group

Description:

Group B is the delayed group and will start music therapy six months after group A.

Treatment:

Other: music therapy after Cochlear Implantation

Group C

Experimental group

Description:

Group C won't receive any music therapy and serves as a control group.

Treatment:

Other: no music therapy after Cochlear Implantation