Prevalence of Secretory Otitis Media amongst Primary School Children in Benin City Nigeria

A child with an episode of OME often experiences a mild to moderate fluctuating hearing loss, thus receiving partial or inconsistent auditory cues, which may make speech more difficult to detect and/or filter from background noise. It has been hypothesized that the resulting misperception or missing of words may affect the input to the knowledge base or to the neural substrate on which language learning is built. It also has been proposed that any difficulties attributable to OME associated hearing loss may become evident when a child reaches school age and faces the challenges of school environment.