Differential hearing difficulties cause kids to fall behind at school

Some children who have trouble learning in the classroom have difficulty switching their listening attention and so have trouble following a conversation from one talker to the next, according to a University of Sydney study published online in Nature's Scientific Reports.

Imran Dhamani

The PhD study led by Imran Dhamani was a collaboration between the Sydney University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and Macquarie University's Audiology Section, funded by the HEARing Cooperative Research Centre.

The study looked at three groups of participants, 12 adults, 12 normal children and 12 children with persistent listening difficulties in noisy environments, but no diagnosis of a hearing disorder or other attentional disorder.

Paper co-author Associate Professor Simon Carlile said the researchers were determined to find out why some children, with otherwise normal hearing, fell behind in the classroom.

"A wide battery of clinical tests indicated that children who complained of listening difficulties had otherwise normal hearing sensitivity and auditory processing skills," he said.

Simon Carlile

In our study, we showed that these children were markedly slower to switch their attention compared to their age-matched peers.

In a noisy conversation with many participants, this means that these children were having trouble following a conversation as it moved from one talker to the next, making it difficult for them to get the gist of what was being said."

"A deficit in the ability to switch attention across multiple talkers now provides the basis for this otherwise hidden listening disability, especially in noisy environments involving multiple talkers, such as classrooms.

"What we have done is provide a tool to diagnose a particular symptom that indicates an underlying problem that has been undiagnosed to date."

Dr Mridula Sharma

Co-author, Macquarie University audiologist and Senior Lecturer, Dr Mridula Sharma said the researchers had discovered the answer to an important question, so far not investigated in this population.

"Children had been brought to audiologists by either their parents or teachers, who had done a whole heap of tests on them, only to not be able to diagnose the problem.

Dr Sharma said that, prior to the study, only a third of the children presenting at the audiology clinic at Macquarie University had gone on to be diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD).

"But two thirds of these children were being sent back home without a diagnosis on what the problem was.

We knew there was something there, we just hadn't worked out the right question to ask. We now have a real handle on what the problem is."

Associate Professor Carlile said the group are now developing a test that can be easily used by audiologists and GPs in their consulting rooms.

"Often we see that medical diagnosis is based on a clinical presentation, and to date, neither the audiologists nor the GPs have had the question to ask of these kids having trouble at school," he said.

"A symptom can have many causes and a clinical presentation can only be judged on the symptom."

Some forms of attentional disorders (ADHD) can be treated with medications, we don't know yet whether that is appropriate here and some forms of these attentional disorders can be treated with cognitive and other behavioural or training therapies, where you are helping people latch onto the appropriate cues to help manage these conditions.

"We are now working on developing a simple clinical test to diagnose this differential hearing condition, and aim to make it available to audiologists."

ADD vs APD: When an Attention Issue is Really an Auditory Issue

When your child is struggling in school, you want to get to the root of the issue as quickly as possible. Nowadays there is more awareness about a wide spectrum of learning problems.

Most teachers receive some training about the major diagnoses, and educational psychologists have a full toolkit of diagnostic assessments.

Once you have a name for the symptoms you are seeing, plans can be made to ensure that the education provided is appropriate for a child’s needs.

But what happens if you suspect that the diagnosis your child receives is the wrong

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is a familiar term to most parents. ADD diagnoses have been on the rise for the last few decades. However, there is a lesser known disorder, with a similar list of symptoms, which may be overlooked: APD (Auditory Processing Disorder).

APD may initially present as an attention deficit issue, but in reality it has nothing to do with a child’s ability to sit still. Rather, APD stems from a weakness in the ability of the brain to process the sounds it receives.

This specific weakness can be either acquired through brain injury or illness, or genetically inherited.

Symptoms

• ADD and APD share a number of symptoms, such as:
• Struggling to focus in a noisy environment
• Fidgety and easily distracted
• Showing some aggression or even isolation socially
• Difficulty following directions
• Lower academic performance
• Zoning out in a conversation

Each of these external symptoms has a different internal cause, depending on the diagnosis. Both can in turn cause reading problems, and both appear in the 7 Main Causes of Reading Difficulty (video).



Children with ADD struggle with the above symptoms because there is insufficient activity in the frontal lobe to regulate the strong neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex.

Without the necessary control over the cerebral cortex, the activity there is just unregulated ‘brain noise’ of neuronal chaos.

Children with APD, on the other hand, struggle with these symptoms because the world around them sounds ‘foggy’ or unclear.

A child with APD will have perfect hearing; the problem lies in the brain’s interpretation of incoming sounds, not the hearing mechanism itself.

You can imagine how not being able to properly understand what people are saying could lead to all of the above behaviours, and then some!

You can read the full article here at Easy read System