Experts: Limbaugh Should Regain Hearing

Dec. 21, 2001 -- Radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had surgery to implant a cochlear device in his ear, should soon be hearing the voices of conservative talk-show callers again.

The 50-year-old Limbaugh underwent the two-hour procedure on Wednesday at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles. Doctors said the surgery was successful.

Limbaugh revealed in October that he began losing his hearing in the spring due to an auto-immune disease that caused his body's immune system to attack his inner ear. At the time, he said he had lost all hearing in his left ear.

After the surgery, Limbaugh released a statement saying, "I feel great."

"The surgery went smoothly, and I'm looking forward to enjoying the holidays and returning to the air in early January," he said.

Cochlear Implants Common

The talk-show host's doctors did not discuss his prognosis further, but experts say cochlear implants are not unusual for patients like Limbaugh.

"Auto-immune hearing loss, depending upon who is defining it, is a relatively common cause for adult implants," said Dr. Douglas Mattox, chairman of the department of otalaryngology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

According to Dr. Bruce Gantz, director of the Cochlear Implant Clinical Research Center at the University of Iowa, the procedure has proven to be "quite successful" in the past.

"The best performance with these devices is up to 80 percent single word understanding and 100 percent of words in sentences," Gantz said.

"Auto-immune inner-ear disease damages the inner-ear hair cells that transform mechanical energy into electrical signals that are interpreted as sound in the brain," he said. "The implant stimulates the nerves directly, bypassing damaged hair cells, enabling the brain to interpret the signals as sound. "

The implant is connected to the external processor one month after surgery. It usually takes a number of weeks or months for the brain to recognize the sounds as words, but there are exceptions. Occasionally, people are able to understand words on day one after the programming is completed.

Dr. Alan Micco, otologist/neurotologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, says those in Limbaugh's situation benefit from cochlear implants. Micco expects Limbaugh to be hearing again in no time.

"In general, the patients that lose there hearing later in life, especially after they have learned to speak, do very well," Micco said.

Limbaugh had continued broadcasting despite the hearing loss. His callers' comments were quickly transcribed so he could read and respond to them.

His radio program is heard on 600 stations nationwide.