Prevalence of sensorineural hearing loss in children in Costa Rica

There is very limited information available about hearing loss in children in Latin America and in Central America in particular. Costa Rica is a peaceful, well-organized country with an excellent health care system and a very good infrastructure of roads, programs, and services. It served as the site for a four-phase study to determine the incidence and prevalence rate for sensorineural hearing loss in children in that region of the world. The four phases involved (1) screening over 12,500 children in the public schools, (2) examining those enrolled at programs for the hearing impaired, (3) searching the community for children not in schools or special programs, and (4) an extensive questionnaire designed to obtain basic demographic data about hearing-impaired children in the country. Included were questions about age of identification, etiology, and hearing aid use. Results of phases 1 and 2 are reported here. Using a 1.368 per 1,000 live birth average (a figure reported for 36 nations), the projected number of hearing-impaired children in Costa Rica should be about 1,068. After concluding the first two phases of the study, it was determined that the actual number of hearing-impaired children in Costa Rica is between 1,174 and 1,274. That is a ratio of between 1.50 and 1.63 hearing impaired per 1,000 live births, well within the ranges reported elsewhere. Since this is the first national study of a Latin American country, that information is significant, suggesting that the general prevalence of hearing loss in that part of the world is the same as in the developed nations of Europe and North America.