There a Simple Way to Test Your Baby's Hearing

Sound asleep and unaware of his surroundings, 36 hour old Sean, a hefty 8 pound 6 ounce newborn, was having his hearing tested. The test used what looked like your ordinary personal computer with unusual wires attached which the lady audiologist brought Sean's bassinet over to. The audiologist placed a small plastic probe attached to one of the wires in the baby's right ear, then typed some keys on the computer. A complicated, multicolored display became visible on the screen.

I visited this ear study to watch a surgical procedure that could very well give a lot of children with hearing problems an edge on managing their daily tasks. Every year 24,000 babies are born with a hearing loss and 4,000 more are born deaf. This process, known as the otoacoustic emissions (OAE) test, was conceived for allowing families and pediatricians know in a matter of hours following birth on the strength of their newborns hearing; it is an opportunity for parents to give their children a chance to live their life with minimal, or no disabilities, at all.

It is common for hearing impairment to go undetected until a child is 2 or 3 years old. This may lead to devastating results. Parents may watch their child struggle with speech and language skills. Children never speak real words until much later, and they never have the involvement of their surroundings that hearing provides. The first couple of years of life are critical for the emotional and intellectual development of the child. In certain instances, an erroneous diagnosis of mental inadequacy is made for a child who has hearing loss.

Conducting hearing testing on every infant born was a complicated process prior to the development of OAE in 1990, and it was also very expensive. According to audiologists, there are other very accurate tests which are called ABSR or auditory brain stem response. This test involves attaching electrodes to the baby's head to measure auditory nerve activity. The downside is that the test takes at least half of an hour and must be performed by a professional audiologist or physician, and that means you'll pay at least $90. There is just not an adequate number of professionals in this country to give out these evaluations to all the children being born.

On the other hand, OAE is relatively affordable and never calls for a full-time practicing audiologist's assistance. This new exam has cut the time to approximately 5 minutes by exposing the small hair cells in the cochlea to sound and analyzing their response. A microphone is used to detect the response made from the hair cells when the sound is transmitted into the baby's ear. After the test was administered on one side the audiologist shifted the baby to his other side to repeat the procedure, looking pleased with the results she was seeing. Baby Sean was lucky enough to be born with nearly perfect hearing.

If the first test indicates hearing deficiencies, a second test is given a week later. So soon after being born an infant can sometimes have fluids in the ear that can cause the results to show up poorly. An auditory brain stem response assessment will be done if a newborn exhibits any signs of a hearing condition on the second test, as this will help to narrow down the issue. A plan to deal with the issue is then devised among the pediatrician, audiologist and parents.

There have been instances of babies with little hearing loss getting hearing aids by the age of 3 months. In some cases, that will solve the problem and the baby will be able to hear normally. At 18 months of age, the parents may opt to have a cochlear implant placed in the ear, a life-long solution for hearing impairment.

When it comes to severe hearing conditions, a parent learns early on in life to take more time with teaching their child about their planet by employing visual prompts. As long as the parents are devoted to spending time with the child and do things correctly, there should be no problem with their development. A parent is confronted with having to pick different methodologies in managing deafness, including such techniques as lip-reading, cued speech, ASL (American Sign Language) and hearing aids, each method has those who believe it is the most productive.

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