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. 2002 Sep 23;4(2):123–129. doi: 10.1007/s10162-002-3007-9

Impaired Binaural Hearing in Children Produced by a Threshold Level of Middle Ear Disease

Sarah C M Hogan 1,2, David R Moore 1,✉
PMCID: PMC3202709  PMID: 12943367

Abstract

Otitis media with effusion (OME), a form of middle ear disease, is the most common reason for young children both to visit their family doctor and to have surgery. Almost all children have at least a single episode of OME before their first birthday and annual incidence rates exceed 50% in each of the first five years. For most children, OME occurs infrequently, but about 10–15% of children have OME during more than half of their first six years. Middle ear effusions attenuate and delay sound, causing conductive sound distortion during the crucial years for language acquisition. The many studies of OME effects on language and other indices of development have produced mixed results. However, a consensus is emerging of mild language impairment in the preschool years, with subsequent performance, emotional, and behavioral difficulties. In addition to the peripheral hearing loss produced directly by the disease, binaural and other central auditory deficits can outlive the OME. It has been unclear which children are at risk of central impairment following OME, since the children studied have generally been recruited from otolaryngology clinics. Consequently, a detailed prospective history of the middle ear status of participants has not been available. By studying six-year-old children with a lifetime known history of OME, we show in this study that only those children with a cumulative OME experience of more than about half the time during the first five years consistently have residual impaired binaural hearing.

Keywords: otitis media, binaural unmasking, spatial hearing, conductive hearing loss

Full Text

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Acknowledgements

We thank the children who participated in the study, and their parents, for their years of dedicated commitment to our research. Mervyn Hardiman designed and programmed the computer game and provided other valuable help and advice throughout the experiment. Doug Hartley helped test some of the children. We are grateful to Oliver Kacelnik, Andy King, Marina Rose, and Jan Schnupp for reading and commenting on the paper. The research was generously supported by grants from the Medical Research Council, the Oxford and Anglia Regional Health Authority, Defeating Deafness (The Hearing Research Trust), and the John Ellerman Foundation.

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