Does Screening Improve Language and Communication Skills?
No prospective, controlled study directly examined whether newborn hearing screening results in improved speech, language, or educational development. None of the State-based programs described in Table 2 reported the outcomes of treatment for infants identified to have hearing impairment. One retrospective cohort study compared language performance in hearing-impaired children detected by UNHS (n=25) to unscreened children (n=25).51 All study subjects were participants in the Colorado Home Intervention Program (CHIP), a program that provides hearing aids and home visits for children with hearing loss.61,62 Children born after 1996 in a hospital that employed UNHS and who did not have significant cognitive delays were compared with children born since 1992 in hospitals without a UNHS program. Subjects were matched on degree of hearing loss (mild, moderate, moderately-severe, profound), cognitive quotient (CQ), and age at time of speech language evaluations. The 2 groups were similar in
