Influence of personality traits and mental health on treatment outcome after cochlear implantation.

Objective In the course of developing evidence-based medicine, analysis of patient-related factors that affect treatment outcomes is necessary. The objective was to identify for cochlear implant (CI) care patient characteristics that affect outcome to enable more prudent counseling.

Methods Prospectively, 49 adults were assessed with a psychometric test battery before and 12 months after CI surgery. Mental health was assessed with the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-D), disease-specific quality of life (QoL) with the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire (NCIQ), generic QoL with the WHO questionnaire (WHO-QQOL), and personality traits with the Big Five Personality Test (B5T). Speech understanding (SV) was assessed before and after implantation with the Freiburg Monosyllable Test and the Oldenburg Sentence Test.

Results All patients showed significant improvement in SV and disease-specific QoL. Work ability, generic QoL, and mental health were stable. Multivariate analysis revealed a significant negative influence of neurotic personality traits on QoL. This influence persisted after adjustment for influencing factors previously identified in univariate analysis (age, openness, language comprehension, social environment, work ability).

Conclusion  Patients with pronounced neurotic personality traits report a greater reduction in QoL postoperatively. Since this has an influence on the subjective outcome, instruments to assess personality traits prior to CI fitting are useful to counteract false expectations by counseling.

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Artikel online veröffentlicht:
12. Mai 2023