OBJECTIVE Prenatal ultrasound exams have become increasingly frequent. Although no serious adverse effects are known, the public health implications would be enormous should adverse effects on auditory development be shown. This study looks to establish a possible correlation between hearing loss and increased prenatal ultrasound exposure. DESIGN Retrospective cohort analysis. SETTING Terti...

INTRODUCTION Newborn hearing screening leads to the early detection of hearing impairment. The aim of screening is to decrease or remove the effect of hearing impairment on development of speech and language by timely diagnosis and effective treatment. A number of risk factors lead to delayed start of decreased hearing ability including: 1. Congenital infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV) virus,...

Recent technological advances have made feasible universal newborn hearing screening and therefore early detection of permanent childhood hearing impairment. Over the past three years, new information has been published on whether early intervention is beneficial, the possibility of harm arising from newborn screening, and its cost. Dramatic progress has been made in the large scale implementat...

background and aim: otoacoustic emissions (oae) and automated auditory brainstem response (aabr) are the most commonly-used methods for universal neonatal hearing screening (unhs). various sensitivity and specificity rates have been reported for the oae and aabr tests as tools for screening newborn hearing. the main objective of this review was to determine the pooled sensitivity and pooled spe...

It is well established that permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) has a detrimental impact on speech and language development. The past two decades have seen the gradual introduction of universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) programmes coupled with early intervention programmes. We review studies that have capitalised on the advent of newborn hearing screening to assess the impact o...

Congenital hearing loss is the most frequent birth defect. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Joint Committee on Infant Hearing established quality of care process indicators for Universal Newborn Hearing Screening starting from 1999. In a previous systematic review of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening studies we highlighted substantial variability in program design and in reported pe...

PURPOSE To document the epidemiological characteristics of a group of children who are hard of hearing, identify individual predictor variables for timely follow-up after a failed newborn hearing screening, and identify barriers to follow-up encountered by families. METHOD The authors used an accelerated longitudinal design to investigate outcomes for children who are hard of hearing in a lar...

Congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is an important public health problem with approximately 7 in 1,000 newborns infected and consequently at risk for hearing impairment. Newborn hearing screening will fail to detect this hearing impairment in approximately half of the cases because late onset hearing loss is frequent. Hearing impairment has profound impact on cognitive and social develo...

Newborn screening is the practice of testing every newborn for certain harmful or potentially fatal conditions, such as hearing loss and certain genetic, endocrine, and metabolic disorders that typically are not otherwise apparent at birth. Newborn screening in the United States began in the 1960s. Universal newborn screening has become a well-established, state-based, public health system invo...

BACKGROUND The Kingdon model, based on the convergence of three streams (problem, policy, and politics) and the opening of a policy window, analyses the process by which a health issue is placed on the political agenda. We used this model to document the political agenda-setting process of the newborn hearing screening programme in Belgium. METHODS A qualitative study based on a document revi...