Special report
Deafness can be detected and treated in the first months of a baby’s life. Otoacoustic emissions hearing testing should be performed on all newborns, preferably before the mother and baby are discharged from the maternity ward or, if this is not possible for some reason, within the first month of life.
The exam may show bone problems or signs of genetic changes that can cause hearing loss or deafness. Without this early screening of newborns, it is difficult to know if there are hearing changes in the first months and years of a baby’s life.
Deaf or hard of hearing children may hear some sounds, but not hear enough to understand spoken language, which can negatively impact their future communication and language skills and, in the long term, will also impact the child’s academic achievement and social-emotional development.
Gabriela Ibedaca, an ENT specialist, said that when a child is born, parents obtain laboratory tests and a pediatric evaluation, which can determine what the child sees in the first few days, but not whether the child hears.
For her part, the audiology specialist, Perla Moros, who is in charge of screening or audiometry of newborns, explained that there is a specific study that the audiologist performs to determine the minimum hearing level that a human being can hear, through frequencies.
Moros indicated that conversation levels must be between 0 and 25 decibels, “if the patient exceeds these levels we are talking about hearing pathology, and they can be medium, moderate, severe or profound hearing losses, depending on the patient’s response. Depending on the result, a prosthesis adaptation treatment or a surgical treatment such as a cochlear implant can be applied.”
These problems can be detected in newborns quickly and easily using specialized equipment, such as otoacoustic emissions, a method that measures sound waves produced in the inner ear. A small probe is placed inside the baby’s ear canal. This probe measures the response (the echo) when clicks or tones are played in the baby’s ears. It is a quick test that takes about 5 to 10 minutes, is painless, and can be done while the baby is sleeping or lying still.
The equipment is connected by Bluetooth to the audiologist’s laptop, which makes a report and gives it to the patient’s family member, so that it can be interpreted by their pediatrician or by the
Audiologist Perla Moros recommended that parents perform these tests on their babies, “even if they think the child is hearing.”
Photos Courtesy
#Hearing #problems #interfere #language #development
2024-08-05 06:56:50
