Diagnosing Hearing Problems Early Help Prevent Learning Issues

Identifying hearing problems early on can save a child's life when it comes to learning. Recent findings published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood show that diagnosing deafness by as early as nine months can help to dramatically better potential reading problems.

For the study, researchers have been studying the development of a group of children who were identified with permanent childhood hearing impairments (PCHI) at a very early age in a pilot screening program that was conducted in Southampton and London in the 1990s.

Follow-up assessments from the children who were aged eight showed those who were screened at birth had better language skills than children who were not screened.

"Our previous work has shown that children exposed to newborn hearing screening had, on average, better language and reading abilities at age eight years. We are now able to show that this screening program can benefit these children into their teenage years," said lead study author Colin Kennedy, professor of neurology and pediatrics at the University of Southampton and a consultant pediatric neurologist at Southampton General Hospital, in a news release. "We believe that the early superiority in the reading skills of the children who were screened may have enabled them to read more demanding material more frequently than their peers with later confirmed hearing difficulties, thus increasing the skill gap between the two groups."