Bhubaneswar, May 29: A team of doctors at the Sum Hospital have, for the first time in Odisha, successfully conducted a Cochlear Implant on a 29-year-old woman who had suffered total hearing loss ten years ago, a SOA University release said on Saturday. The impairment had also severely affected the woman’s speech quality causing her to get isolated within her family.
Doctors in the ENT Department of Sum Hospital, who examined her, found that her inner ear or cochlea had been damaged. A team headed by Prof. Santosh Kumar Swain with the assistance of an expert on Cochlear Implant from Delhi successfully conducted the procedure on the woman. Sum Hospital has now become one of the few centers in the country where Cochlear Implant, considered the most advanced technology for hearing loss in the world, is conducted by well-trained surgeons with all the required infrastructure and backed by an auditory verbal therapist. The Cochlear implant procedure costs about Rs. seven to Rs. ten lakh per procedure but it can be done on children from BPL families below the age of five years free of cost under a centrally sponsored program, the release said adding the facility was available at the Sum Hospital which has been empanelled with the central government.
If diagnosis of hearing impairment is done before the child turns three followed by intervention with Cochlear Implant, it could make the child normal in speech and hearing, it said.
