What is it about?
Feeding and swallowing disorders can lead to auditory problems in various ways. For example, when a child does not swallow frequently enough, swallowing difficulties may minimize natural ventilation of the middle ear due to automatic opening of the Eustachian tube during swallowing. Such poor ventilation can increase the potential of fluid accumulation, leading to middle ear infections. This study was designed to establish the prevalence of auditory problems in children with feeding and swallowing disorders.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The study established a significantly higher prevalence of hearing problems in children with feeding and swallowing disorders compared with typically developing children. These findings suggest that inclusion of an audiologist on the interdisciplinary team is likely to improve overall interventional outcomes for children with feeding and swallowing disorders. For example, behavioral treatment approaches are often an important element of the treatment provided to children with feeding and swallowing disorders. Such approaches frequently include verbal instructions and reinforcements, and typical hearing is necessary for maximum benefit from such verbal input. In children with transient or permanent hearing loss, the audiologist can inform both parents and the interdisciplinary team about the hearing loss and the procedures for maximizing the efficiency of verbal input.
Perspectives
Several children and their parents participating in this study clearly benefited from the expertise of an audiologist on an ongoing basis. For example, one child was blind, one child was suspected of being blind, and two children had cortical visual impairment. The parents of these children were unsure about whether their children were able to hear them and whether they benefited from any auditory input. This behavior was partially guided by the fact that all of these children were nonverbal. In such cases, when hearing was typical, the audiologist was able to demonstrate the child's responses (eye blinks, stopping sucking or vocalization, etc.) to auditory stimuli and was able to encourage the parents to provide plenty of verbal and tactile input. Such parents can take advantage of the feeding time to provide verbal stimulation to promote language development. Verbal stimulation or reinforcement can also assist in reducing feeding difficulties.
Vishakha Rawool
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Prevalence of Auditory Problems in Children With Feeding and Swallowing Disorders, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, May 2017, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2016_jslhr-h-16-0217.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
