Otitis Media and Speech-in-Noise Recognition in School-Aged Children

Abstract

The present study examined the long-term consequences of otitis media (OM) on speech perception abilities in noise. 55 children with a prospective 3-monthly documented middle-ear status and hearing loss between birth and 24 months completed a ‘speech-in-noise’ (SPiN) test at the age of 7 years. Both hearing loss and the cumulation of uni- and bilateral OM incidents in early life were significantly correlated to the performance on the SPiN test at school age. Other background factors such as socio-economic status, language perception and cognitive development did not predict the performance on the SPiN test. Only the language production score at age 7 was also significantly related to the score on the SPiN test. The present study deals with the risk of OM in early life and its accompanied hearing loss on auditory processing, specifically speech perception in noise, up to school age.

Speech Perception after Early-Life Otitis Media with Fluctuating Hearing Loss

“…Gravel and Wallace [1992] and Schilder et al [1994] have studied long-term effects of OM on language perception in background noise and found that performance in school-age children was correlated to early-life OM, years after middle ear problems had resolved. This has been found even in children born healthy without complications and normal cognitive and language development [Zumach et al, 2009]. Moreover, OM has been found to affect phonetic coding [Mody et al, 1999].…”

“…While it is the actual hearing loss induced by OM rather than the number of OM episodes that is more sensitive to long-term consequences [Zumach et al, 2009; see also Schilder et al, 1994], hearing loss was not considered in the studies by Groenen et al [1996] and Clarkson et al [1989].…”

Auditory temporal abilities in children with history of recurrent otitis media in the first years of life and persistent in preschool and school ages

“…This argument was used to justify a study that also found no difference in the results of the binaural interaction test in children aged 6 years, who had the middle ear function monitored during the first years of life (7) . The third hypothesis is also related to the recurrence of episodes of OME, because a connection was established between the worst performance in the speech-in-noise test and the magnitude of fluctuating conductive hearing loss due to disease in the first years of life, and not the number of episodes of the disorder (14,15) . In this study, it was not possible to obtain back data on auditory acuity.…”

“…The effects of recurrent OME (ROME) on hearing acuity in the short and long terms are well documented (6,7) . However, results on the auditory central nervous system (ANCS), despite the vast amount of information available, are controversial (2,(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16) . Studies focus on the premise of interdependence between episodes of OME and the change in tone thresholds, called fluctuating conductive hearing loss, because 80% children diagnosed with OME exhibit this kind of loss that acts as a sensory deprivation (8,15) .…”

“…Other aspects to be considered that may have caused the divergent results are the variety of tests used and auditory abilities evaluated, as well as the age at which children were evaluated. Speech recognition in monotonic, low redundancy condition is commonly used, and the speech-in-noise test is the most studied (7,11,12,14) . However, temporal processing is also often chosen, represented by resolution abilities (2,10,16) as well as binaural interaction (7,8) .…”