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Of all the congenital problems for which babies can be tested, abnormal hearing is the most common. Entering this world with a significant hearing impairment are two to four babies per 1,000 and this is the reason why the condition is 20 times more frequent than phenylketonuria, a metabolic problem for which new-borns are routinely screened. Estimates range from 14 months to 2 1/2 years when it comes to the average age at which a serious hearing impairment is diagnosed. It is really not early enough even though it sounds like it. What was mentioned by the director of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland was that even though babies were only a few weeks old, their brains were already developing the capacity for language and this is something that people take for granted. In this case, if they receive no language input during a critical window of time, in this case a time that stretches back to birth, babies lose a great opportunity to learn language. Here, early detection can provide a child with a good chance of communicating normally, either in sign or spoken language by the time he or she begins school, but late detection and intervention may lead to a long, dreary game of catching up ahead. A professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the studies said that this doesn't mean there's no hope if a child's problem is discovered late, but it would be harder. Fighting for across the board screening for hearing problems in new-borns are hearing advocates and this is precisely the reason why. According to the director of government relations for the American Speech Language Hearing Association, a professional group that advocates early screening, given the baby boom let surge that the US is experiencing right now infant screening is highly necessary. There are several states today that have enacted legislation for universal new-born screening programs. What is serves to do is to test the hearing of an adult. Audiologists simply put people in a booth and have them press buttons and parrot back phrases in response to the sounds they hear. In testing the hearing of a baby, this is another matter. When it comes to this, a baby's ears can do the talking because of an odd property of the ears that has been discovered and appreciated only in the past few decades. It is possible for the ears to both receive and emit sounds. Responding to noises, the source for these sounds which are the outer hair cells in our ears move around causing our ability to hear to become sharpened. Taking this into consideration, the movements cause the eardrum to vibrate and this sends noises back out into the world. Considering the low level noises made by the ears, they do this when exposed to sound but we cannot hear these. However, they're loud enough for instruments to detect. Here, the essence of screening for hearing problems in new-borns is having sounds that are not generated. For this process, a click of sound is sent into a baby's ear and then a little microphone detects any sound coming out and technicians only need a few minutes to finish it. You can find anything from mild to profound hearing loss when it comes to a test like this.
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