The Impact of Asymptomatic Congenital Cytomegalovirus on Adult Quality of Life.
Maja Z Katusic, Noël E Mensah-Bonsu, Jerry A Miller and 5 others
PMID 33055522WHAT IT FOUND
Adults who had asymptomatic congenital CMV reported average life satisfaction similar to uninfected adults.
Hearing loss did not lower scores, but only 14 had hearing loss.
Key findings
01Adults with asymptomatic congenital CMV and uninfected controls had similar average life-satisfaction percentile scores.
02Among adults with asymptomatic congenital CMV, those with hearing loss did not differ significantly from those without hearing loss in life-satisfaction percentile scores.
03Mean IQ scores did not differ significantly between adults with asymptomatic congenital CMV and controls, and IQ was not significantly associated with life-satisfaction percentile scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 61 of 109 asymptomatic congenital CMV subjects and 23 of 55 controls completed the quality-of-life survey, although completers and non-completers did not differ significantly in demographic or hearing characteristics. The control group was small, with only 23 adults, so the study may miss smaller differences. Only 14 asymptomatic congenital CMV adults with hearing loss completed the survey, so the hearing-loss result cannot be treated as definitive. Controls were matched only by being born within six days of a CMV-positive newborn at the same hospital, not by other background factors. The survey measured overall quality-of-life percentile scores, not the sixteen individual life areas, so it cannot show which parts of life were affected. The study did not examine parental quality of life or parental distress related to newborn CMV screening.
Declared interests
Two authors reported funding from Merck Sharpe & Dohme since July 2016 for salary support for data analysis on long-term outcomes of congenital CMV. The remaining authors declared no conflict. The article is also tagged as NIH and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing loss has no effect on adult quality of life. Only 14 adults with asymptomatic congenital CMV and hearing loss completed the survey, and the authors said this subgroup was too small for definitive conclusions.