Speech Pathology and Audiology Commons^™

How Many Babies With Hearing Loss Will Be Missed By Repeated Newborn Hearing Screening With Otoacoustic Emissions Due To Statistical Artifact?, Karl R. White, Lauri H. Nelson, Karen F. Munoz

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

Objective: People who manage newborn hearing screening programs are often told that repeating OAE hearing screening more than two or three times per ear unacceptably increases the probability of false-negatives (i.e., passing babies who have permanent hearing loss). This study evaluated the accuracy of that recommendation.

Design: A 2.0 cc coupler and three human ears with hearing loss were used to estimate the number of false-negative results per 1,000 OAE screening tests. Using those results, together with the prevalence of hearing loss among newborns, we calculated the number of babies that would be missed due to repeated testing.

Results: If …