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Hispanic Children More Likely to Have Hearing Loss
Second study finds rare eye disease missed, mistreated among urban youngsters
By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter
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FRIDAY, April 3 (HealthDay News) -- Children from Hispanic or low-income families are more likely to have hearing loss, and a serious but rare eye disease is often missed or mistreated among urban preschoolers.
The hearing finding was based on a review of five studies conducted between 1966 and 2007, all of which explored hearing loss among children of various ethnicities from birth through the age of 19.
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In contrast, the vision finding was drawn from a new investigation conducted between 2003 and 2007 that looked into so-called "refractive eyesight errors" among black and white children (aged 6 months to about 6 years) living in the Baltimore area.
"Based on the data available in the various studies we looked at, it appears that in the Hispanic population and in low-income homes, there is likely a higher burden of pediatric hearing loss," said Dr. Donald G. Keamy, lead author of the hearing study and a surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and an instructor in the departments of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School.
"But we don't know the absolute cause of that increased rate," Keamy noted. "And it is also very important to point out that the information we looked at is actually both somewhat old and very fractured, in the sense that there is no unified national approach to collecting pediatric hearing loss information. So, we can not even say if the finding is absolutely true until we have a much more systematic and fresh analysis of the problem, which would require a more national approach to the assessment of hearing loss in children."
Keamy published his team's observations in the April issue of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. The vision study team, from Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, reported its findings in the April issue of Ophthalmology.
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Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 4/3/2009
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SOURCES: Donald G. Keamy, M.D., surgeon, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and instructor, departments of otology and laryngology, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Robert D. Frisina, Ph.D., associate chair, otolaryngology, and professor, department of otolaryngology, department of neurobiology and anatomy, and department of biomedical engineering, University of Rochester Medical School, N.Y.; April 2009, Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery; April 2009, Ophthalmology
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