A study of the causes of hearing loss in a population of deaf children with special reference to genetic factors

Abstract

To investigate the possibility of determining more accurately the cause of deafness a study was undertaken of 86 children attending a special school for hearing impaired children. The numbers of children and families were relatively small to allow greater study of the families after each child was medically examined and records were inspected. Each child was examined to determine pure tone thresholds for air and bone conduction, speech audiogram and the pressure/compliance curves. This study did not suggest a high incidence of post-natal cause of sensorineural deafness in children. Apparently the majority of those children who cannot be identified as falling into the classification of known etiologies do belong correctly in the autosomal recessive or dominant categories.