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Deaf baby given hearing after pioneering surgery in Coimbra An 11-month-old baby who has since birth suffered from ‘profound deafness’ will soon be able to enjoy healthy hearing thanks to pioneering surgery performed for the first time in Portugal.
After the operation, which took place this week at the Centro Hospitalar de Coimbra (CHC), the baby’s implant will take up to one month to fine-tune but will eventually allow the infant to hear the world like any other healthy person. It will also allow the baby to learn to speak. Without the surgery, it is likely the infant would have been deaf and dumb. Even though this type of operation has already been carried out in several countries it is the first time it has been carried out on a child under one year old in Portugal. Experts have described the intervention as an “important milestone” for Portuguese medicine. “Cochlear implants in children younger than one year old is an important milestone. The earlier it is fitted, the earlier the child’s hearing and neurones are stimulated and, therefore, they will be better equipped to develop linguistic capabilities”, said Carlos Ribeiro, head of the CRC department that is dealing with the little boy’s implant. A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides the sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. In Mr. Ribeiro’s opinion, “ideally the implant should be done at around one year of age”. “For those who have never had hearing, if it is not done early enough, the brain cannot process the information he explained, adding that, if the device is not fitted early enough, “the child may never fully recover the ability to understand and use language”. Carrying out a procedure of this type is, according to Mr. Ribeiro, “very complex” and “just one step” in what will be a “much longer procedure”. In Portugal the pioneering intervention was first carried out by Portuguese surgeons Manuel Filipe Rodrigues and Fernando Rodrigues on adults in 1985, then on children, in 1992. So far 352 implants have been fitted in children, the youngest so far being 16 months. Last year, under the guidance of Carlos Ribeiro, the CHC fitted the first ever hybrid cochlear implant.
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