Hearing screening for Japanese children and young adults using the automated auditory brainstem response

Objective

Hearing screening programs in schools are particularly important for children because they can enable early detection of hearing problems and early intervention. However, there has been little research on this topic. The MB11BERAphone^® is a novel, accurate and efficient Automated Auditory Brainstem Response device for hearing screening in infants. The aim of this study was to investigate the validity of the MB11BERAphone^® as a hearing screening device for pre-school, school-age and young-adult individuals.

Methods

Between January 2010 and March 2012, 163 normal and hearing impaired individuals, corresponding to 321 ears from subjects aged 3–22 years 11 months at Luther Aiji Kindergarten and Nakadori General Hospital in Akita, Japan, underwent primarily conditional play audiometry or conventional audiometry followed by the Automated Auditory Brainstem Response by MB11 BERAphone^®. The statistical analysis was performed with the Predictive Analytics Software (PASW Statistics 18) and presented as the mean, standard deviation (SD) and frequency distribution. The sensitivity, specificity and false-positive and false-negative rates were estimated to analyze the validity of the MB11 BERAphone^® test over audiometry.

Results

Among the normal and hearing impaired ears, 140 were scored as “REFER” and 181 were scored as “PASS” during the hearing screening examination conducted using the MB11BERAphone^® device. The specificity was 95.1%, and the sensitivity was 96.3%. The false positive rate was 5%, and the false negative rate was 4%. The overall timing without precise measurement was less than 7 min. The individuals were divided into groups: pre-schoolers (3–5 years), school-age (6–17 years) and young-adults (18–22 years). When the audiometry and MB11BERAphone^® results were compared, no statistically significant differences (p = ns) were detected among general (pre-schoolers + school-age + young-adult), pre-school, school-age, and young-adult groups.

Conclusion

The results suggest that the MB11BERAphone^® is not only useful for newborn hearing screening but also for hearing screening in older individuals, due to the low cost of the integrated electrodes and the speed with which the examination can be performed.