By Amy Norton
In the US and Europe, infants are screened soon after birth for potential hearing problems. If the screening test suggests they may have hearing loss, further testing is done to confirm or rule out a problem.
Newborn hearing screening is considered beneficial because without it, children's hearing problems would typically go undetected until they are between one and two years old, at which point their language development would already be delayed.
The problem is that this screening, like all medical screening tests, can yield "false positive" results. In fact, most infants who "fail" their hearing screening test are shown to have normal hearing when more-extensive diagnostic testing is done.
To see whether such false-positives cause parents lasting anxiety, Dutch researchers surveyed 442 parents six months after their infant had undergone routine hearing screening.
The group included 288 parents whose newborn had passed the first test and 154 whose infant had inconclusive or positive screening results; in all cases, these infants were later shown to have normal hearing.
Overall, the study found, parents in the two groups had similar results on a standard test of chronic anxiety - suggesting the false-positive test results did not do parents lasting harm.
The finding adds to evidence that "the advantages of the universal newborn hearing screening are larger than the disadvantages," lead researcher Dr. Kitty van der Ploeg, of the research institute TNO in Leiden, the Netherlands, told Reuters Health.
She and her colleagues report their study results in journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Despite the generally positive findings, though, some parents were concerned by their child's false-positive screening results. Six months after the test, the researchers found, 10 percent to 15 percent of these parents said they were worried about their child's hearing, versus four percent of parents whose newborn had passed the screening test.
Van der Ploeg said that while false-positives cannot be eliminated, it might be possible to reduce them. In this study, infants with false-positive results were slightly older than those who passed the screening test. Other research has similarly suggested that the odds of false-positive results depend partially on an infant's age.
In the Netherlands, van der Ploeg noted, it is generally recommended that newborns have their hearing screened when they are between four and seven days old.
But since there will always be some false-positives, she added, screeners should explain the hearing screening process to parents in a way that would minimise their worries.