Congenital Cytomegalovirus-Associated Sensorineural Hearing Loss in Children: Identification Following Universal Newborn Hearing Screening, Effect of Antiviral Treatment, and Long-Term Hearing Outcomes.
Leigh Rohren, Ryan Shanley, Madeline Smith and 6 others
PMID 37563758WHAT IT FOUND
Children with congenital CMV who pass newborn hearing screening are at risk for delayed hearing loss.
Among those who passed screening, 35% developed hearing loss later. Antiviral treatment was associated with less hearing deterioration than no treatment, but this was not a randomized trial.
Key findings
01Among children with congenital CMV who passed the newborn hearing screen in both ears, 35% (6 of 17) developed hearing loss later.
02Antiviral-treated ears showed less progression of hearing loss than untreated ears, with treated normal ears remaining normal and untreated normal ears often progressing to profound loss.
03Hearing loss in congenital CMV can be delayed, progressive, or fluctuating, and is not reliably detected by initial newborn screening alone.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was retrospective and uncontrolled, meaning treatment was not randomly assigned and timing of assessments varied. The population was drawn from a tertiary referral center and was over-represented for symptomatic children, which may limit generalizability to all children with congenital CMV. Information regarding the exact timing of initial diagnostic ABR and whether antiviral treatment had already affected hearing before the first outpatient visit was not available. The sample size was small (44 children), limiting the power to detect significant differences in treatment effects.
Declared interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. The work was supported by the University of South Carolina’s Disability Research and Dissemination Center through a Cooperative Agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that antiviral treatment definitively prevents hearing loss in congenital CMV. The observed benefit was not statistically significant in the regression model, and the study design was retrospective and uncontrolled. The findings suggest a potential association, not proof of efficacy.