The 48-year-old man could no longer hear in his left ear and had been paralyzed on the same side of his face since 2020.
“World premiere at the Pitié-Salpêtrière AP-HP hospital”, announces in a press release this Friday the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris. He recounts the “unprecedented procedure” carried out in the establishment in April 2021, which allowed a 48-year-old man to regain hearing in his left ear and to begin to heal from the facial paralysis which blocked the left side of his body. his face.
The story begins in August 2020 with the dramatic accident suffered by Arnaud Dubois, as told The Parisianwhile the grain farmer was trying to repair his car.
“A glowing metallic projectile entered the left external auditory canal, immediately causing earache, tinnitus, hearing loss, vertigo and complete peripheral facial paralysis on the left side,” explain the doctors, who published their work in theAmerican Journal of Otolaryngology in December.
The operation that followed was carried out by the team from the ENT and Cervicofacial Surgery department of the hospital and the Sorbonne University, and was coordinated by Dr Rémi Hervochon and Dr Ghizlene Lahlou.
Two techniques used at the same time
To cure the forty-year-old, doctors are carrying out “an unprecedented procedure” by combining two treatments at the same time. They proceed on the one hand to the repair of the facial nerve burned in the accident, causing the facial paralysis. Doctors cut and removed the damaged nerve and grafted a sensory nerve from the lobe taken from the farmer’s ear to his palate, explains The Parisian.
On the other hand, a cochlear implant was placed for deafness. It is a “system which will electrically stimulate the departure of the auditory nerve and thus restore sound sensations to the wearer of the implant allowing him to hear”, explains the Hearing Foundation. Part of the system is surgically implanted in the cochlea, ie in the inner ear, the other part is external and is used to pick up sounds.
These two procedures are not new but “this is the first time that these two sensitive techniques have been performed together”, writes the AP-HP, “no patient in the world had to date benefited from such combined treatment”.
Rehabilitation work afterwards
The effects were not visible immediately after the operation, “for a long time, several months, there was no improvement on the face. We believed that the operation was a failure”, explains thus Rémi Hervochon on a daily basis.
But one day, the mouth begins to move slightly and little by little the rest of the face follows. Arnaud Dubois is now at 53% recovery, explains his speech therapist at Parisian, while in April 2021 it was only 9%. To continue to recover, he must comply with daily exercises and massages.
“The patient can now live normally again: he mobilizes his face and has regained binaural hearing”, that is to say with both ears, assures the press release from the AP-HP.
“Neither the patients victims of burn of the ear, nor the patients victims of any other destructive pathology of the ear”, have hitherto benefited from this double-surgery. In this sense, this operation opens “new treatment prospects for any ENT surgeon confronted with one of these medical situations”, rejoices the AP-HP.
