How to Detect a Possible Auditory Problem in Your Newborn

In United States, As per the statistics available with the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, the most common defect at birth, three out of every thousand, is hearing loss of one kind or the other.

Hearing can be of such different types that it need not necessarily indicate deafness but could be as simple as a very mild feeling of unease. A common remedy for hearing loss in children is a combination of therapy and hearing aids.

In extreme cases, doctors recommend what is known as cochlear implants. Cochlear implants work where hearing aids fail to deliver, because unlike hearing aids, they act directly on the auditory nerve. Whatever be the technology used, these devices are unable to restore hearing completely.

To detect hearing problems in babies, it is a good idea to screen them as soon as possible. Language skills can be built more effectively if treatment is started within the first few months of a baby?s life.

A new procedure is helping in detecting hearing loss in babies right after birth. Recently introduced procedures are so effective that if hearing loss is noticed within six months of a child being born, its language development can proceed normally.

22 to 26 months is about the age at which hearing loss gets detected in children. Hearing defects get identified quite by chance when parents and caregivers report speech related problems or language development issues.

It is now possible to screen all newborn babies for hearing loss even before they leave the hospital.

Otacoustic Emissions are now used to figure out how much a newborn baby is able to hear. The ear canal gets sounds directly through the soft probe. The cochlea, or inner ear, produces an echo that is picked up by a microphone inside the same probe. The screening of each ear is completed in approximately 10 seconds while any other procedure would have taken at least 10 minutes.

From the results of the OAE, those babies who seem to have hearing problems, are given the Auditory Brainstem Response test. In the ABR test, three painless electrodes are placed on the baby?s head and shoulders along with a throwaway earphone and the manner in which the hearing nerve responds is measured.

Testing each ear does not take more than 15 minutes.

One of the requirements of these tests is that babies must be asleep. Most parents realize speech related and language problems in their children around the age of 2 years and this leads them on to the underlying hearing problem.

To eliminate the chance of babies having problems after growing up, it is best to screen all of them. This is going to prove very beneficial for the language development of children and also for their entire lives.

Diagnostic testing by an audiologist is necessitated in the case of babies who fail both these tests. This happens in about two percent of the cases.

Amplification equipment is now available to compensate the hearing loss of 2 to 3 month old infants. With early help these children can develop normally.

Article Source: http://www.newsarticlessite.com

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