Overview: Infants and children with hearing loss?part I

✍ Scribed by Vohr, Betty

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 57 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1080-4013
• DOI: 10.1002/mrdd.10070

✦ Synopsis

his issue of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews is the first part of a two-part series on Infants and Children with Hearing Loss. Congenital hearing loss, which is identified at a rate of two to three newborns per 1,000, is the most frequently occurring birth defect. There is a large body of evidence that children who are deaf or hard of hearing and do not receive early intervention are at increased risk of speech and language deficits, behavior problems, and academic failure. In view of these factors, it is remarkable that most of the progress made in the development of public health hearing screen programs, and, subsequently, early hearing detection and intervention (EHDI) systems, began in the United States just over a decade ago.

In 1989 two federal agencies, Maternal and Child Health and the Department of Education funded a demonstration project to assess the feasibility of screening infants in well child nurseries for hearing loss. Two screen methods, transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE) and auditory brainstem response (ABR), were evaluated.