Editorial We are delighted that this issue contains peer reviewed abstracts from the First Annual Symposium of the American Cochlear Implant Alliance, held in Washington in October 2013, with an Introduction by Craig Buchman, the current Chair of the Alliance’s Board of Directors, and Donna Sorkin, the Alliance’s Executive Director. Cochlear Implants International is the official journal of the British Cochlear Implant Group (BCIG), which was founded in the 1980s, by those working in the field of cochlear implantation in the UK for many of the same reasons that have led to the founding of the ACI Alliance. Members of the BCIG are delighted to welcome the Alliance as a major player in our field and with a membership that seems very comparable to that of the BCIG, in representing cochlear implant teams across the nation as well as all the different disciplines represented within cochlear implant programmes. The decision of the Alliance to allow us to publish these abstracts from their first Symposium was very welcome, and we hope that such links will continue in the future. Each nation will inevitably have its own priorities in the relationship between different teams, the setting up of national guidelines for best practice, as well as in the relationship between clinicians and national and local

politicians, and in dealing with the various funding systems that exist within different countries and states. However, the issues that we have in common are many, and represent not only the strategies we need to adopt to provide appropriate funding and service provision at a national level, but also what is really the most important aspect of all our work: the provision of the benefits of cochlear implantation and other auditory implants for the maximum number of the appropriate adults and children who come under our care. This issue includes three original research papers: an audit of bilateral paediatric cochlear implants in the UK; a trial in guinea pigs to assess the potential benefits from the use of a dexamethasone-eluting electrode in reducing intracochlear inflammation after implantation; and a review of postoperative imaging in 220 adult implantees. There are also two case reports. With this issue we are also publishing a Supplement by Professor Graeme Clark (Lasker - DeBakey award winner in 2013, together with Ingeborg Hochmair and Blake Wilson) and his colleagues, describing in detail the radiology and histopathology of the temporal bones of the first patient to receive the University of Melbourne multichannel cochlear implant in 1978.

John Graham, Editor Huw Cooper, Deputy Editor Chris Raine, Chair of BCIG

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1467010014Z.000000000213

Cochlear Implants International

2014

VOL.

15

NO.

5

245