When Babies Cannot Hear

There is a number of congenital problems for which babies can be tested but 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.

You can say that this sounds early enough but no. What was mentioned by the director of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland was that even though babies were only a few weeks old, their brains were already developing the capacity for language and this is something that people take for granted. It is possible for babies to 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. Here, early detection can provide a child with 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 may lead to a long, dreary game of catching up ahead. As a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the studies mentioned, if a child's problem is discovered late this does not mean that all hope is lost but it will be harder. Hearing advocates are pressing for across the board screening for hearing problems in new-borns and this is why they are doing it.

What was said by the director of government relations for the American Speech Language Hearing Association, a professional group that advocates early screening, was that given the baby boom let surge that the US is experiencing right now infant screening is highly necessary. In this case, several states have already enacted legislation for universal new-born screening programs. It is used to test the hearing of an adult. When the audiologists place people in booths, they need to press buttons and parrot back phrases in response to the sounds they hear. It is a different matter to test the hearing of a baby.

Due to an odd property of the ears that has been discovered and appreciated only in the past few decades, you can expect a baby's ears can do the talking. When it comes to the ears, they can receive and emit sounds. The source of these sounds is the outer hair cells in our ears that move around in response to noises, somehow sharpening our ability to hear. When it comes to this, 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. In this case, these are 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. The procedure where a click of sound is sent into a baby's ear and then a little microphone detects any sound coming out only needs a few minutes for the technicians to complete. You can find anything from mild to profound hearing loss when it comes to a test like this.

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