I need to access elements 8959, 10710, 10710 to find their distinct count.

To help you, it would be helpful if you posted the code which populates the array @result. This array holds array references, whose first element is the thing you are looking looking for to get the distinct count, right? Well, use them as key to a hash and sum them up:

my %distinct;
for my $aref ( @result ) {
    $distinct{$aref->[0]}++;
}
print Dumper(\%distinct);
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