Permanent Childhood Hearing Impairment (PCHI) is a congenital defect that affects about one in 1,000 children worldwide. If it goes unnoticed, impaired hearing in a young child can lead to serious delays in language and speech development.

But these problems can be reduced or avoided if the child is fitted with a hearing aid, and parents taught how to encourage communication skills.

Evidence suggests that such intervention programmes work best if introduced as early as possible, at least by the age of nine months. Early detection is therefore beneficial.

Often parents are the first to pick up the symptoms of possible hearing loss. One noticeable sign is the failure of a child to be soothed by sound, which is normally obvious by three to six months of age, and a lack of spoken words by the age of 18 months is a clear indication of hearing impairment.

Researchers from Sheffield and Southampton conducted an eight year follow-up study of babies enrolled in a "universal newborn screening" trial for permanent hearing loss.

The study included a group of 66 children aged seven to nine with PCHI in both ears who underwent physiological screening soon after birth.

They were compared with a similar group who were not screened but received "distraction tests" at the age of seven to eight months.

The researchers found that 74% of the screened children were referred to specialists before they were six months old. Of the group who were not screened, only 31% were referred by this time.

The findings were published in The Lancet medical journal.

From Daily Mail Online