There is a number of congenital problems for which babies can be tested but the most common is abnormal hearing. In this case, per 1,000, there are two to four babies who will enter this world with a significant hearing impairment making the condition 20 times more frequent than phenylketonuria, a metabolic problem for which new-borns are routinely screened. Considering the average age at which a serious hearing impairment is diagnosed, the estimates range from 14 months to 2 1/2 years.
It sounds early enough but this is not the case here. 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.
In this case, if they receive no language input during a critical window of time, in this case a time that stretches back to birth, babies lose a great opportunity to learn language. Early detection can allow a child to have a good chance of communicating normally, either in sign or spoken language by the time he or she begins school, but with late detection and intervention, what follows is a long, dreary game of catching up ahead.
According to a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the studies, if a child’s problem is discovered late then there can still be hope but the situation will be harder. What hearing advocates want is across the board screening for hearing problems in new-borns and this is the reason behind it.
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. In this case, several states have already enacted legislation for universal new-born screening programs.
With this, it is easy 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. It’s another matter to test the hearing of a baby.
In this case, since there is an odd property of the ears that has been discovered and appreciated only in the past few decades, a baby’s ears can do the talking. Other than receive sounds, the ears can also 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. As a result, the movements vibrate the eardrum; sending noises back out into the world.
We cannot hear the low level noises that the ears make when exposed to sound. However, they’re loud enough for instruments to detect.
Dealing with sounds that are not generated is actually the essence of screening for hearing problems in new-borns. In a procedure that takes just a few minutes, technicians send a click of sound into a baby’s ear, and 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.
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