Watching the expression on Grayson Clamp’s face change as he hears the first words of his life is a moving experience.
Born without cochlear nerves, the 3-year-old boy became the first child in the United States to undergo an auditory brain stem implant, giving him the gift of hearing.
“I’ve never seen a look like that,” Len Clamp said of his son’s reaction to hearing his voice, a moment captured on video. “I mean, he looked deep into my eyes. He was hearing my voice for the first time. It was phenomenal.”
The procedure took place recently at UNC Hospitals in North Carolina as part of a clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The surgery was performed by two doctors from the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine: Craig Buchman, a professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery; and Matthew Ewend, neurosurgery department chairman.
Grayson was given an external speech processor with a microphone that breaks sounds into frequencies and sends the data to the implant. An electrode was placed where his cochlear nerves would have been in order to stimulate his brain and give him the ability to hear sounds.
The FDA has approved the procedure for 10 children as part of the clinical trial. Grayson is one of the five youngsters born without cochlear nerves; the others lost their hearing as a result of trauma.
The clinical trial will determine whether a larger trial is conducted with more children and, ultimately, whether auditory brain stem implants become widely available.
Until then, Buchman is satisfied with helping bring sound into Grayson’s life.
“Seeing him respond, that had a lot of feelings for me,” Buchman said in an article on the UNC at Chapel Hill website. “I felt like there was a potential that we were effectively changing the world in some ways.”
