How Accurate Is Parent Rating of Hearing for Children With Otitis Media?

Abstract

Caregiver assessments of child hearing do not accurately predict hearing levels or changes in hearing status. Immittance measures can help identify children at low or high risk for hearing loss, but cannot substitute for audiometry.

Quality of Life of Patients With Otitis Media and Caregivers: A Multicenter Study

“…No significant correlation was found between caregiver‐reported hearing loss and physician‐diagnosed hearing loss, a finding consistent with that of other investigators 12,13 . Unlike previous studies, 5,10 however, a fair positive correlation between patient age and subjective hearing loss was identified.…”

Quality of life outcomes after ventilating tube insertion for otitis media in an Australian population

“…With regard to hearing loss, we did not document the hearing levels pre-and post-procedure for our study, and thus could not examine whether there was any correlation between improvements in QOL (particularly the Hearing Loss domain) and hearing thresholds. In any event, others have found that parental assessment of hearing does not accurately predict hearing levels or changes in hearing status [6,14]. Speech impairment had the least improvement which may be due to the short follow-up in our study.…”

Parental suspicion of hearing loss in children with otitis media with effusion

“…Comparatively, our results appeared to have rather large variations ranging from 7.5 dB to 40.6 dB. In studying mixed cases of either chronic OME or recurrent acute otitis media in the United States, Rosenfeld et al [15] reported that the median PTA for the better-hearing ears in the children with a median age of 3.4 years was 20 dB. We did not attempt to compare the finding with our result (median PTA 15 dB), which solely represented chronic OME.…”