Hearing Test

This afternoon we took Kinley to Children's Mercy South for her appointment with the audiologist. Kinley's pediatrician, OT and nurse practitioner from the special care clinic all agreed that a hearing test was a good idea just to rule out any hearing problems as the cause of her delayed speech.

Kinley is at an increased risk for developing late onset/progressive hearing loss as a result of her rough start in life. This means that even though Kinley passed her newborn hearing screen, we still need to have her hearing monitored up until she is about 10 years old. I have a good friend who is an audiologist and she sent me a few studies on CDH and hearing loss. From what I learned it is not necessarily the CDH that causes hearing loss, rather the side effects from some of the treatments Kinley required. ECMO and certain antibiotics were the two main culprits for causing hearing loss, and the longer duration of treatment increased the risk. Kinley had her 21 day run on ECMO which certainly increased her risk for hearing loss. As far as the antibiotics go, Kinley was on vancomycin and gentamicin. Both of those antibiotics can cause hearing loss even with the close monitoring that she received while on those medications. There was even one study that listed mechanical ventilation, especially with the high frequency oscillator as a risk factor for developing hearing loss. Also listed as possible risk factors in that study were the use of inhaled nitric oxide, loop diuretics such as Lasix and hypoxia, or decreased oxygen levels. Based on the studies that I read it looks like anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of ECMO graduates may show signs of late onset/progressive hearing loss, so the percentage is fairly small, but worth monitoring.

Kinley's appointment started off with the audiologist looking into Kinley's ear. According to her, everything looked normal. Then she used an instrument in Kinley's ear to try and get Kinley's eardrums to move. Kinley's eardrums moved, so that was also good. Next up was the behavioral hearing test. The audiologist left the testing room and Kinley, Kevin and I were left inside. From behind the 1 way glass in the room next door, the audiologist made sounds appear from various speakers around the testing room and watched Kinley's response to the noises. After that test was finished she came back into the room and discussed the results with us. She said that Kinley's hearing was borderline, but within normal limits at this time. She said that Kinley's hearing should not be affecting Kinley's speech and language skills at this point. However, this test just tested Kinley's overall hearing, not each ear individually. So, the audiologist tried one last test on Kinley. This test involved putting a little device on one of Kinley's ears and was supposed to test the hearing of each ear individually. The problem was that Kinley had to be quiet for the test and she started to cry a little when the device was placed on her ear. We were not able to get accurate results from that test.

The audiologist recommended that we come back in 3 months to follow-up and go from there.