Improved health and development of children who are deaf and hard of hearing following early intervention.

Infants begin to learn language in the earliest months of life. In the absence of early identification and intervention, infants who are deaf or hard-of-hearing experience significant and lasting deficits in language learning, academic achievement, social-emotional development, and quality of life. Evidence is mounting that early identification of infants who are deaf or hard of hearing through newborn hearing screening and intervention by the age of 6 months improves developmental outcomes for these children, especially in the area of language proficiency. Newborn screening programmes, including newborn hearing screening, are typically public health activities aimed at the early identification of infants who are affected by certain congenital disorders: including genetic, metabolic, haematologic, and infectious diseases. Early identification of these conditions is critical, as timely intervention can lead to a significant reduction of morbidity, mortality and associated disabilities in affected infants. For infants with hearing loss, the goal of early identification is to provide early intervention leading to language development and academic achievement commensurate with cognitive ability, and ultimately an improved quality of life. For newborn hearing screening, the definition of early intervention is initiation of intervention by the age of 6 months. Initiatives for newborn hearing screening have spread to every continent and many countries now have well-developed, comprehensive programmes of screening, diagnosis, and early intervention for childhood hearing loss. Although no exact statistics currently exist, tens of millions of infants probably receive newborn hearing screening each year. Because the developmental effects of early intervention for hearing loss are improved and sustained language development, large-scale studies documenting the language outcomes in early-identified children take decades to collect. Furthermore, because full-scale implementation of universal newborn hearing screening has occurred only within the last 5 years in most countries, many early-identified children are still at preschool-age. Thus, documenting these youngsters' language development is a work in progress. Despite these limitations, evidence is mounting that early intervention for childhood hearing loss improves the developmental outcome of these children.