On the Difficulty of Defining Duration of Deafness for Adults With Cochlear Implants

The amount of time that a person with a cochlear implant experiences severe-to-profound hearing loss before implantation is thought to impact the underlying neural survival, health, and function of the auditory system, thus likely being closely related to post-implantation performance in auditory tasks. The reporting of this number in the research literature is ubiquitous. Although it is most commonly called "duration of deafness," our point of view is that the term is imprecise and the calculation of this number can be nontrivial, particularly for cases of adult onset of hearing loss. We provide suggestions on changing the terminology to "duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss." We also propose a method of determining this number through a series of questions that leads a participant/patient through their progression of hearing loss. We encourage research methodology that requires researchers to explicitly report the process used to determine the duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss with the overall goals of (1) improving rigor and reproducibility in cochlear-implant research and (2) improving the translation between research findings and clinical recommendations.