Hearing Handicaps

Out of the large number of congenital problems for which babies can be tested, the most common is abnormal hearing. Entering this world with a significant hearing impairment are two to four babies per 1,000 and this is the reason why the condition is 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 is really not early enough even though it sounds like it. Saying that people failed to accept the fact that babies were not simply things that lay around and that their brains were already developing the capacity for language even though they were only a few weeks old was the director of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland. A great opportunity to learn language is lost when it comes to babies if they receive no language input during a critical window of time, in this case a time that stretches back to birth. In a child, early detection leads to a good chance of communicating normally, either in sign or spoken language by the time he or she begins school, but late detection and intervention can lead to a long, dreary game of catching up ahead. The situation will be harder but there will still be hope even if a child's problem is discovered late as a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the studies said. Considering the crusade of hearing advocates to have across the board screening for hearing problems in new-borns, this is why.

According to 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 highly necessary. Already enacting legislation for universal new-born screening programs are several states. It is possible to test the hearing of an adult with this. The audiologists put the people in booths and they should press buttons and parrot back phrases in response to the sounds they hear. It's another matter to test the hearing of a baby.

Here, a baby's ears can do the talking since there is an odd property of the ears that has been discovered and appreciated only in the past few decades. Other than receive sounds, the ears can also emit sounds. In response to noises, the source of these sounds which are the outer hair cells in our ears actually cause our ability to hear to be sharpened. What happens here is that the movements cause the eardrum to vibrate and this sends noises back out into the world.

The ears tend to make low level noises when exposed to sound but these are not audible to humans. These are noises which are loud enough for instruments to detect. Considering the essence of screening for hearing problems in new-borns, this means dealing with sounds that are not generated. Only a few minutes is needed by the technicians to finish the process where a click of sound is sent into a baby's ear and then a little microphone detects any sound coming out. With this test, you will be able to detect anything from mild to profound hearing loss.

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