1992 Volume 35 Issue 2 Pages 120-126
Otological screening study consisted of tympanometry and questionairre was performed on 4, 503 3-year-old children in Sendai City. One thousand and sixty-four children (23.6%) were selected for further investigations due either to tympanometric abnormalities or suspected abnormality in hearing and/or speech. Five hundred and eighteen children, out of 627 (82.6%) selected as having tympanometric abnormalities, received consultations of otolaryngologists, and fifty-one percent of them were diagnosed as having secretory otitis media (SOM). On the other hand, two-thirds of examinees selected by questionairre were found to have abnormalities in hearing and/or speech.
This new screening system has turned up two hundred and sixty-four (5.8%) SOM and four unilateral sensorineural hearing loss (0.09%). In 78.2% of SOM discovered in this screening system children did not have any complaints before the screening, therefore tympanometry seems indispensable to the system. These results suggest that our screening system is efficient to detect hearing or speech disorders in 3-year-old children.
