[Early hearing screening for brain impairment baby--Crib-O-Gram]

A retrospective investigation by ABR and COG was performed to children with brain impairment determined by neurological follow-up out of children who had hearing screening test, and the relationship with the presence or not of hearing loss was analyzed. The results obtained are as follows. 1) The failure rate in COG test was 46.3% in the brain impairment group. It was significantly higher than in the hearing loss high-risk group and the low-risk group. However, 20% of 101 children with brain impairment ware cases in which the COG test could not be performed. Presumably , this is due to the special character of COG test. 2) In the brain impairment children group, the rate of true positive, true negative and false negative by COG as to the presence or not of hearing loss stood at 68.8%, 31.3%, and 0% respectively. Since, however, 32.4% of the children who failed to pass COG had hearing loss, the usefulness of COG can be said to be high. 3) The incidence of hearing loss was significantly high at 15.0% in the brain impairment group compared with other groups. In contrast, the rate of true positive was significantly high, the rate of true negative significantly low and no false negative was noted in the low-risk group. So COG was considered appropriate as a hearing screening device that can be used from the neonatal period. 4) In the brain impairment group, the rate of true positive by ABR was high at 86.7%, but the rate of true negative was 13%.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)