Hearing Assessment in Infants, Children, and Adolescents: Recommendations Beyond Neonatal Screening.

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are at high risk for permanent deficits in language acquisition and downstream effects such as poor academic performance, personal-social maladjustments, and emotional difficulties. Identification of children born D/HH through newborn hearing screening and subsequent timely early intervention can prevent or reduce many of these adverse consequences. Ongoing surveillance for changes in hearing thresholds after infancy is also important and should be accomplished by subjective assessment for signs of atypical hearing and with objective screening tests.

Limitations of universal newborn hearing screening in early identification of pediatric cochlear implant candidates.

Objectives: To determine whether implementation of universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) in the state of Illinois has affected the ages at diagnosis of hearing loss and implantation in children receiving cochlear implants and to determine how often children undergoing implantation had UNHS results with no indication of hearing loss (pass).

Design: Retrospective case review of 417 randomly selected pediatric implant recipients born before and after UNHS was mandated by law in Illinois. Data analyzed included hearing screening status, ages at initial diagnosis of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) and severe to profound SNHL, and age at implantation.