Baha Attract hearing system uses magnets

July 21--Conversations in crowded rooms used to confuse Verla Garlock.

A benign tumor caused the 77-year-old Emporium woman to lose all hearing in her right ear. Though her left ear was fine, it was almost impossible at times for Garlock to pick up words someone spoke across a lunch table.

"I would go out to lunch with my girlfriends, and I wouldn't be able to hear them talk at my table," Garlock said during a visit to ENT Specialists of Northwestern Pennsylvania, 3580 Peach St. "I could hear everything that was said at the next table over, though, because it was on the side of my good ear."

As Garlock talked, audiologist Vicki Bilski was fitting her for the Baha (bone-anchored hearing aid) Attract system, an partially implantable device for people with deafness in one air.

Garlock wears the Baha Attract's sound processor, smaller than a 9-volt battery, behind her right ear. It stays in place with magnets -- one in the processor and another under her skin.

The Baha Attract transforms sounds into vibrations, which are amplified and transferred through a titanium implant in the skull to the cochlea, a snail-shaped tube in the middle ear. The vibrations are converted into nerve impulses that the brain interprets as sound.

"It tricks your brain into thinking you can hear out of both ears," said Sidney Lipman, M.D., of ENT Specialists, who has installed more than 70 Baha devices. "It's natural sound, not that tinny sound you get from many regular hearing aids."

The magnet is the newest development in the Baha Attract. It replaces a snap that stuck out of the patient's skull and attached to the device.

Tissue around the snap would get infected in about 20 percent of the cases, Lipman said.

"It wasn't always right away, either," Lipman said. "Sometimes it was two, three years later. I knew of a patient who had an infection 10 years later and had to get (the snap) removed."

Lipman inserts the internal magnet during a 45-minute surgery. Marcia Montgomery went to Saint Vincent Hospital for the procedure on Wednesday after suffering hearing loss in her left ear more than two years ago.

Montgomery, 63, of , suffered her hearing loss following a viral infection.

"I thought it was just some type of sinus infection," Montgomery said while waiting in the Saint Vincent preoperative area. "I picked up my telephone to make a call, and I didn't hear a dial tone. I thought my phone was dead. It turns out it was my ear."

It will be about two months before Montgomery heals enough from surgery for Bilski to fit her for a Baha system.

Gavlock waited patiently for her fitting. Once the device was programmed and placed behind her ear, Gavlock's eyes grew wide.

"All of the sudden the sound is there," said Gavlock, whose insurance covered the nearly $10,000 cost of the device. "It feels like I have a bionic ear."

DAVID BRUCE can be reached at 870-1736 or by e-mail. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNbruce.

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