Early hearing screening improves child development

Screening for hearing problems within the first weeks of life is beneficial for children especially when interventions quickly follow the detection of any impairment.

Hearing is essential to the development of speech and language and it is believed that early treatment of hearing loss, as this study would seem to indicate, results in better speech and language outcomes.

Researchers analysed outcomes of 570,386 Dutch babies born between 2003 and 2005, comparing children born in regions in which newborn hearing screening had already become the norm to those born where distraction hearing screening, a behavioural test conducted around the age of 9 months, continued to be the standard.