Prevalence of Childhood Hearing Loss in Rural Alaska.
Susan D Emmett, Alyssa Platt, Joseph J Gallo and 9 others
PMID 37287104WHAT IT FOUND
Among rural Alaska Native children aged 3 to 21 years, hearing loss was 10.5% by the older WHO cutoff and 23.4% by the newer cutoff in children aged 7 and older.
Middle ear disease was common in youngest, high-frequency loss increased with age.
Key findings
01Using the older WHO cutoff of PTA >25 dB, hearing loss affected 10.5% of children, with mild loss most common and unilateral loss more common than bilateral loss.
02With the newer WHO cutoff of PTA ≥20 dB among children aged 7 and older, hearing loss was 23.4%, and most of it was mild.
03Middle ear disease affected 17.6% of children and was highest in the youngest children, while high-frequency hearing loss was present in at least 20.5% and more prevalent in children aged 7 and older.
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 results are generalizable to the Bering Strait region, not directly to all of Alaska. Point prevalence was measured over 12 to 18 months and assumed the condition did not change over time. Audiometric testing was done in school rooms rather than sound-proof booths, so ambient noise may have affected results. Younger children were more likely to have missing audiometry, and the multiple imputation estimates for hearing loss in that group had uncertainty. For children aged 3 to 6, the newer WHO cutoff of PTA ≥20 dB could overestimate hearing loss because testing sometimes stopped at 20 dB under the original protocol. High-frequency hearing loss was only measured in year 2 and could not be reliably imputed for children aged 3 to 6. Comparisons with historical Alaska prevalence or US general population studies are not direct because designs, age ranges, regions, and criteria differ.
Declared interests
Funding was from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI AD-1602-34571), and a T32 training grant (DC005360) supported Kelli Hicks. The supplied text does not list commercial conflicts.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 23.4% figure as the prevalence for all children. That estimate uses the newer WHO cutoff and applies only to children aged 7 and older; for children aged 3 to 6, the authors limited analysis to the older cutoff because the newer cutoff could overestimate hearing loss.