You should always contact your doctor if your child experiences any of the following: Instead, you should remain vigilant over the course of months to really make sure. There are no guarantees that your child does not have ANSD, even if they pass a newborn hearing screening. However, certain factors appear to increase the chance that a child may suffer from it, including: Ultimately, the exact causes of ANSD are not known. However, there is no guarantee of this, as others will decline or remain consistent. Some individuals, though, may improve over time. A voice might sound like rainfall, a road crossing like a foghorn, a cat’s purr like an engine. Others still experience a nullifying effect, wherein all sounds are blurred together into one continuous unidentifiable noise. Some children, for instance, can hear sounds but have difficulty determining exactly what they are. Symptoms of ANSD are notoriously inconsistent and can vary wildly from time to time, place to place, mild to severe. This means that as yet, not every newborn hearing screening program can accurately detect it, leaving hundreds and thousands of people insufficiently diagnosed. Only recently has ANSD begun to be understood and diagnosed, and many questions remain unanswered. Therefore, the signal that arrives at the brain is scrambled and disjointed, or in some cases doesn’t arrive at all, and as a result, the sound doesn’t make sense to the brain.
With ANSD sound enters the ear normally, but due to the damage to the inner row of hair cells (or synapses between the cells and the auditory nerve), sound doesn’t transmit to the brain as it otherwise would. After the nerve impulses reach the brain, they are interpreted as sound, and the cycle is complete. With sufficient vibration, the inner hair cells transform the signal into electrical nerve impulses via the auditory nerve, which bridges the gap between the inner ear and the brain. The cochlea is filled with liquid and lined with minuscule hair cells: when vibrations move through it, the outer hair cells oscillate back and forth to amplify the sound. The inner ear is composed of a snail-like chamber called the cochlea. At this point, the sound causes the eardrum to vibrate, while the three tiny bones (collectively referred to as Ossicles, these include the Malleus, Stapes and Incus) boost these vibrations and carry them on into the inner ear. Sound waves travel from the air to the outer ear, through the ear canal to the middle ear. How Hearing WorksĪbove you can see a detailed diagram of how normal hearing function works.
Robust early diagnosis and intervention are integral to the long-term treatment of the condition, so it is highly recommended that if your child has any difficulty hearing whatsoever that you contact your GP or one of our specialists immediately. Nowadays it accounts for between 10 to 15% of all hearing loss diagnoses.įortunately, children who have ANSD can still acquire strong communication and language skills with the help of therapy, medical devices and visual communication techniques. Although signs can begin at any age, the vast majority of those who have ANSD are born with the condition and come to be diagnosed within the first few months of life.Īs research into the disorder becomes better and better, the number of children diagnosed with it is ever greater. It occurs when the signal between the inner ear and the brain becomes distorted.Īlthough the direct reasons for ANSD are not well understood, it can affect premature children and those with a strong hereditary history of the condition more often. Hearing loss can be a relatively common issue for newborn children among the varying types, auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD) is perhaps one of the most disruptive.
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