Every child born in Canada should be screened for hearing loss right after birth, Canada's pediatricians say.
The Canadian Paediatric Society released a position statement Monday urging all provinces and territories to bring in programs to screen all newborns for hearing problems.
Several provinces, including Ontario and British Columbia, have fully-funded universal hearing screening for newborns, but many parts of Canada do not.
Some provinces have only partial programs primarily targeting infants in the neonatal intensive care unit. And Quebec, which planned in July 2009 to fund a screening program, has yet to fully implement it.
Most newborn hearing programs aim to screen babies by one month of age, which allows a diagnosis to be confirmed by three months, and an intervention to be offered by six months.
The CPS notes that as many as three in 1,000 babies are born profoundly deaf, and another three in 1,000 have serious hearing loss.
Children identified with hearing problems of deafness can often be treated with hearing aids, cochlear implants or surgery to correct ear malformations.
"Neonatal hearing loss is one of the most common congenital conditions," Dr. Hema Patel, the author of the policy statement, said in a release. "When we diagnose a hearing impairment early, it has a significant lifelong effect on the neurological development and learning potential of the child."
She added that the ability to accurately detect hearing loss in newborns and to re-establish hearing is one of the major advances in pediatrics in the last 20 years.
Delaying a diagnosis of hearing problems can lead to plenty of language problems for children and their families, the group says. When children are tested as newborns, there can be a diagnosis by three months. Steps to correct the hearing loss or help the child adjust to it can be offered by six months.
But when children don't get newborn screening, the average age at diagnosis is closer to two years old, the CPS says.
Many studies have shown that infants who are diagnosed and receive help for their hearing problem before six months of age score 20 to 40 percentile points higher on tests of language and social adjustment skills and behaviour compared with hearing-impaired children who receive help later on.
While previous hearing test involved ringing a bell near the baby's ear and then watching for a response, the test was not very reliable. Today's test, called the otoacoustic emission test, involves placing a probe into the ear. that sends out a tone into the ear. The tone should elicit an echo which the screening device then records. If there is no echo, that indicates a problem with sensory hair cells on the ear's inner ear, or cochlea.
