The Chinese Hearing Questionnaire for School Children

Abstract

Hearing loss is the most common of all disabilities in China, with three million of the 1.4 billion population affected. Recently, the release of an official neonatal hearing screening consensus has drawn attention to the importance of continued surveillance throughout childhood and the need for a system that is suited to the Chinese situation. The current research aimed to develop and evaluate a questionnaire for mass screening of school children in China. In Jiangsu Province, 317 rural students were screened using the Chinese Hearing Questionnaire for School Children (CHQS) and otoacoustic emissions (OAE). Test performance measures for the questionnaire method revealed average overall accuracy (A' = 0.54), while higher system accuracy was obtained for the OAEs (A' = 0.85). The OAE screening also produced very high efficiency and specificity values with reasonable sensitivity. Unlike the OAE protocol, the CHQS will require substantial modification to improve its sensitivity prior to utilization as a mass screening tool.

Questionário para monitoramento do desenvolvimento auditivo e de linguagem no primeiro ano de vida

“…As observed in Tables 2 and 3, when the sensorineural hearing loss is considered, the applied questionnaire demonstrated specificity of 96% and sensitivity of 67% -data consistent with the previous studies that used the questionnaire as methodology (21)(22)(23)(24) . It is important to highlight that the sensitivity of the tool and the false negative index obtained (33%) were the result of the non-identification of the two children with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss.…”

“…The use of questionnaires as a way of identifying alterations in the auditory development in different age groups is widely discussed in the literature (21)(22)(23)(24) .…”

“…Generally, the studies pointed out that questionnaires directed to the identification of alterations in the hearing function present specificities between 94% and 100% and sensitivity varying from 10% to 75% (21)(22)(23)(24) . This variability in sensitivity can be justified by the methodological differences in regard to the age group studied, comprised of children between 6 months and 7 years of age; or with regard to the value of audibility considered as hearing loss, which in some studies had been considered 40 thresholds above the dB HL definition of incapacitating loss of the WHO (16) or above 20 dB HL when considering children of 0 to 1 year (28) .…”

A programme of studies including assessment of diagnostic accuracy of school hearing screening tests and a cost-effectiveness model of school entry hearing screening programmes

“…Briefly, 10 primary studies were included in this update. 17,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] One was published before 2005 24 but was included here as it had been missed by the original 2007 HTA report. 12 The other nine studies were published in the period 2005-2014.…”

“…17,22,23,[25][26][27][28][29][30] Four of them were conducted in China 22,23,27,30 and one in each of the following countries: Brazil, 25 Greece, 29 Japan, 26 Kenya, 24 the Philippines 17 and the USA. 22 (three studies [25][26][27] did not report mean age and only gave age range as an inclusion criterion). The studies were relatively balanced in terms of participants' gender, the proportion of males ranging from 48.4% 26 to 62.5% 30 (two papers 23,28 did not report details).…”