Contents
- Baby has a hearing impairment: suggestive symptoms
- How do you know if your baby is hearing badly and what to do if in doubt?
- Deafness screening: a detection test offered at birth since 2012
- The different stages of deafness in children
- Congenital, infectious or progressive: several possible causes of deafness in children
There are certain signs that should arouse your suspicions very early on because it is not uncommon for a toddler to have hearing problems. In France, a baby out of 1000 are born deaf and as many children become so at the age of 4 each year. There are also cases of false positives, very mild deafness that deteriorates rapidly, hence the importance of evaluating hearing during the child’s first years.
Baby has a hearing impairment: suggestive symptoms
Doctors recognize this: the first doubts often come from the parents themselves. Lack of reaction to noise, language delay, behavioral problems… Certain signs should attract your attention. Because, far from being rare, hearing problems should not be underestimated. Even today, the diagnosis of deafness is often too late, around a year and a half. Whereas, ideally, it should be done before Baby is 6 months old!
How do you know if your baby is hearing badly and what to do if in doubt?
Nonchalantly, test your hearing at home… If in doubt, you can always test your child’s hearing without even noticing it:
- Talk to him with different intonations and observe his reaction, or lack of reaction. Normally, if he can hear well, he should turn his head in the direction of the sound, no matter how loud the voice or sound is. But be careful not to test it every moment, it might get bored and stop responding.
- Know that a deaf child perceives more air movements and vibrations of the ground. So it is not because he jumps at loud noises that he has good hearing.
- Take the time to ask you about his behavior and its psychomotor development.
The earlier the diagnosis, the better! Today, we know perfectly how to detect deafness or hearing impairment from the first day of baby’s birth, using a small probe. For a long time, they were only carried out in very specific cases, in the event of risk factors: prematurity, birth trauma (resuscitation), infection of the mother (rubella, toxoplasmosis, cytomegalovirus) or family history.
Deafness screening: a detection test offered at birth since 2012
The decree of April 23, 2012 provides that screening for permanent neonatal deafness be offered to all newborns. The latter includes:
- a hearing screening test, offered systematically before the baby is released from the maternity ward. This should determine the need for additional examinations.
- more in-depth examinations, carried out in a specialized center before the baby’s third month, when the location examination could not be performed or did not allow the baby’s hearing abilities to be assessed. If there is any doubt, more in-depth examinations will be carried out in a specialized center before the baby’s third month.
- information for parents on communication methods that can be set up with the child.
The goal of this screening: to allow the establishment of early care, to develop communication and language with the child.
Parents have the right to refuse this screening.
Infant hearing: several checks during medical visits
The first tests to check children’s hearing are usually done during the medical visits for the 9th, 12th and 24th months. This does not mean that the first signs of deafness cannot appear sooner! So, if you have the slightest doubt, do not hesitate to consult an ENT doctor who, in the event of a suspicion of hearing problems, will direct you to a diagnostic and referral center (Cdos).
As usual, the earlier the screening, the better the improvement results. Everything suggests that a diagnosis around the 4 months of the toddler would be ideal for optimizing the care of a child with hearing problems. Of course, the announcement of the diagnosis is never easy for parents to hear, but everyone must arm themselves with courage to face the situation as well as possible.
The different stages of deafness in children
Children can suffer from a greater or lesser loss of decibels, which can lead to:
- a mild deafness (loss of 20 to 40 dB): the child does not perceive high-pitched sounds;
- a moderate deafness (loss of 41 to 70 dB): the child hears only loud voices;
- a severe deafness (loss of 71 to 90 dB): the child has difficulty hearing loud noises;
- a profound deafness (loss greater than 91 dB).
Congenital, infectious or progressive: several possible causes of deafness in children
There is not one, but many possible causes of deafness in a child: one genetic origin (in 2/3 of cases), a birth trauma, the prematurity, the meningitis, an infection of the Toxoplasmosis, CMV (cytomegalovirus) or rubella during pregnancy, a drug poisoning…
There are also so-called progressive deafness (of genetic origin), which appear gradually around 3 years, 6-7 years or 12-13 years of the child. The MP3 player, too, can be a cause of deafness in a child who uses it very intensively, but who often also initially has a weakened ground.