None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Now that newborn hearing checks are available, hearing loss is often picked up soon after birth and hearing aids are fitted shortly after. There are standard procedures for checking that the hearing aids make sounds audible to a child, but no one knows how effective the hearing aids are for supporting discrimination between sounds because there are no clinical tools to do so. Further, no one knows whether this early discrimination ability may relate to later language development of children with hearing loss. The IDEAL study aims to 1) develop new clinical tools for assessing whether an infant with hearing loss can hear the differences between sounds after they are fitted with hearing aids; and 2) determine the relationship between early auditory discrimination and spoken language skills at 3 years of age for children with hearing loss. The findings will provide the much-needed evidence to guide best-practice management of children with hearing loss.
Interventions
Children with bilateral hearing loss, between ages 3 to 12 months in NSW and VIC, will be recruited through the national hearing service provider, Australian Hearing. Children will complete: 1) objective (cortical auditory evoked potentials in response to sound changes) assessment of speech discrimination at 6-8 weeks post hearing-aid fitting, and 2) objective and behavioural (head/eye movements in response to sound changes) assessments of speech discrimination at 7-12 months of age. They will r
Children with bilateral hearing loss, between ages 3 to 12 months in NSW and VIC, will be recruited through the national hearing service provider, Australian Hearing. Children will complete: 1) objective (cortical auditory evoked potentials in response to sound changes) assessment of speech discrimination at 6-8 weeks post hearing-aid fitting, and 2) objective and behavioural (head/eye movements in response to sound changes) assessments of speech discrimination at 7-12 months of age. They will return at chronological age of 3 years for repeat assessments of speech discrimination and additionally tests of their speech and language ability. In addition, data will be collected on the child's auditory behaviour in everyday life and family demographics from parent questionnaires. We also include a normative, comparison group of typically hearing infants who will complete the same assessments as the children with hearing loss. The findings will lead to novel clinical tools for assessing auditory discrimination in infants, early referral for cochlear implantation if necessary, and new evidence-based clinical guidelines for best practice management of children with hearing loss.
Sponsors
National Acoustic Laboratories, Australian Hearing
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
1 Months to 12 Months
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Participants will be infants: (1) below 12 months of age, (2) detected with bilateral hearing loss, and (3) to be fitted with hearing aids or been fitted with hearing aids in the previous 3 months.
Exclusion criteria
The exclusion criteria are (1) parent indication that the family does not wish to be contacted for research purposes, (2) presence of any diagnosed disabilities in addition to hearing loss, (3) parents who are not willing to travel to the Australian Hearing Hub (in NSW) or Melbourne University (in VIC) for testing, and (4) children who use a cochlear implant.
Outcome results
None listed