ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: Auditory feedback (AF) contributes to speech intelligibility (SI) which is vital in social interactions to examine AF effect on SI of adults with cochlear implant (CI). The relationship between age of CI implantation and AF on SI was examined as well. METHOD: Twenty native Hebrew speaker pre-lingual adults with a hearing loss using CIs from ages 2 to 19 years. Participants were recorded reading excerpts from a book and word lists from MIDBAR test in two situations-with and without using their CIs. Sixteen judges listened to the recordings and rated the speech characteristics of the participants reading the excerpts using an adapted version of Speech Intelligibility Test and Intelligibility Questionnaire for Teachers. RESULTS: Significant differences were found between the SI of words of those who received CI before and after 3 years. AF effect was found only for the older implantation group. The questionnaire indicates good reliability among all the speech characteristics. The speech characteristics most affected by the AF are the disruption of consonants followed by the varied degrees of intonation precision and nasality. CONCLUSIONS: AF affects speech characteristics differently and is vital to SI. The use of the adapted version of Speech Intelligibility Test and Intelligibility Questionnaire for Teachers can be used clinically to assess SI and rehabilitation of young adults with CI. AF accessed at a younger age decreases the dependency on AF in later years.
Subject(s)
Cochlear Implantation , Cochlear Implants , Deafness , Speech Perception , Adolescent , Adult , Child , Child, Preschool , Deafness/surgery , Feedback , Humans , Reproducibility of Results , Speech Intelligibility , Young AdultABSTRACT
Anti-HMGCR antibodies represent a characteristic serological feature of statin-exposed and statin-unexposed patients with immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy (IMNM). We assessed anti-HMGCR antibodies in patients with suspected IMNM following statin exposure and patients with other autoimmune rheumatic diseases. We evaluated the presence of anti-HMGCR autoantibodies in sera samples from 13 statin-exposed patients who were suspected of having IMNM, 38 patients with different inflammatory and autoimmune rheumatic diseases and 29 healthy subjects. The autoantibodies were evaluated by two assays: a new chemiluminescence QUANTA Flash HMGCR kit utilizing BIO-FLASH system and QUANTA Lite® HMGCR ELISA kit. Twelve samples from patients with suspicion for IMNM were found positive for anti-HMGCR antibodies by both assays. Only one of the 13 samples that were found positive by ELISA was negative by CIA. A very good qualitative correlation (κ = 0.95; 95 % CI 0.85-1.0) and quantitative agreement (Spearman's rho 0.87; P value < 0.0001; 95 % CI 0.62-0.96) were found between these two assays. All samples from healthy subjects and from the disease-controlled patient cohort were negative for anti-HMGCR antibodies. In comparison with ELISA results, the CIA exhibited high sensitivity and specificity values of 92.3 and 100 %, respectively. Receiver operating characteristic analysis for CIA and ELISA yielded area under the curve values of 0.99. The presence of anti-HMGCR antibodies may be a useful biomarker of IMNM in statin-exposed patients. There is a good correlation between the two anti-HMGCR antibody assays evaluated in the present study.
