Neonatal screening for hearing impairment—The Oman experience

Screening for neonatal hearing loss in the Eastern region of United Arab Emirates

“…The rate of sensorineural hearing loss among well infants at our hospital (0.18%) was very similar to reported incidences from Saudi Arabia (0.18%) [13] and Oman (0.12%) [14] but was considerably lower than in Kuwait (2.0%) and Jordan (1.37%) [7]. The international figures for hearing deficit among well babies has been reported to range between 0.1% and 0.2% [1][2][3].…”

Hospital-based universal newborn hearing screening for early detection of permanent congenital hearing loss in Lagos, Nigeria

“…It was also comparable to the coverage of 99.9% in Mexico [24] or 98.9% in Hong Kong [25] and exceeded the coverage of 91% in Brazil [26], 85% in Malaysia [27], 67% in Oman [28] or 45% in South Africa [29]. This high screening coverage reflected significant maternal willingness to participate in the new voluntary infant hearing screening programme in this location as no mother withheld consent.…”

On the threshold of effective well infant nursery hearing screening in Western Sicily

“…After the first stage screening in fact, our overall referral rate was 3.64% with a percentage value of false positives of only 3.34%; therefore we obtained, just with the first step, lower value than the most TEOAE based screening programmes from other countries such as Malaysia (12%), South Africa (11.1%), Oman (11%), Pakistan (10.2%) and Polonia (4.4%) maintaining a good coverage percentage [7,14,25,26,29]. The specificity value after first step screening was 96.7 AE 1.6% and, this percentage increased to 98.78 AE 0.3% after the second stage screening with a total number of 51 referred, 41 of which false positives (1.21%) ( Table 2).…”

“…In our pilot study, even if babies underwent screening in the third week of life, after discharge with a consequent higher risk of loss from the screen with respect to those screened before discharge, the coverage rate ranged from 90% to 92.71% with a mean value of 91% in line with JCHI, comparable to the coverage of Mexico, Hong Kong, Brazil and higher than those of 85% in Malaysia, 67% in Oman and 45% in South Africa [14,16,[23][24][25][26].…”