Background: Hearing loss is the most common congenital abnormality with a reported prevalence of 1 to 3 ‰ live births. Early detection and intervention is critical to prevent the adverse consequences of a delayed diagnosis on speech language and cognitive development.
Aim: study the frequency of deafness in the newborns and the infants under 6 months followed in Tlatli Hospital in Nabeul and to search for correlations with risk factors identified by the Joint Committee on Infant Screening.
Methods: 397 children aged between 04 days and 5 months with deafness risks are tested on two-stage strategy of evoked otoacoustic emissions (EOAE) and auditory brain stem response (ABR).
Results: EOAE test is positif in 9,32 % of cases (37 children) and the ABR test is positif at 7 of these ; that is 1,76 % of cases. Significant statistic correlations were found with the antecedent of bacterial meningitis (p=0,001) and trisomy 21 (p=0,018). Unfortunately 40 % of the children were lost to follow-up.
Conclusion: EOAE with ABR provide an excellent procosis screening technique of hearing loss. Such screening implies however the creation of networks to assure patient follow up.