Screening An Infant's Hearing

Of all the congenital problems for which babies can be tested

, abnormal hearing is the most common. Considering how two to four babies per 1,000 enter this world with a significant hearing impairment, the condition is actually 20 times more frequent than phenylketonuria, a metabolic problem for which new-borns are routinely screened. Estimates for the average age at which a serious hearing impairment is diagnosed range from 14 months to 2 1/2 years.

It may sound early enough but this is not the case. The director of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland said that in the past, we haven't really appreciated that even when only weeks old babies were just lying there, their brains were already developing the capacity for language. When it comes to babies, they lose a great opportunity to learn language if they receive no language input during a critical window of time, in this case a time that stretches back to birth. In this case, a good chance of communicating normally, either in sign or spoken language by the time he or she begins school, comes with early detection but with late detection and intervention comes a long, dreary game of catching up ahead. What a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the studies said was that there is always hope even if it becomes more of a challenge if a child's problem is discovered late. Considering the crusade of hearing advocates to have across the board screening for hearing problems in new-borns, this is why.

As mentioned by the director of government relations for the American Speech Language Hearing Association, a professional group that advocates early screening, given the baby boom let surge that the US is experiencing right now infant screening is very important. Already enacting legislation for universal new-born screening programs are several states. What is serves to do is to test the hearing of an adult. What people do here is press buttons and parrot back phrases in response to the sounds they hear when the audiologists put them in booths. This is not the case when the hearing of a baby is being tested.

A baby's ears can do the talking in this case considering an odd property of the ears that has been discovered and appreciated only in the past few decades. What the ears can do is receive as well as emit sounds. What sharpens our ability to hear is the source for these sounds which are the outer hair cells in our ears as they move around in response to noises. Taking this into consideration, the movements cause the eardrum to vibrate and this sends noises back out into the world.

We cannot hear the low level noises that the ears make when exposed to sound. Still, these are normally loud enough for instruments to detect. When it comes to the essence of screening for hearing problems in new-borns, sounds are not generated here. Only requiring a few minutes for the technicians to complete the procedure, a click of sound is sent into a baby's ear and then a little microphone detects any sound coming out. You can find anything from mild to profound hearing loss when it comes to a test like this.

by: nathaliaaili

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