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Emerging Trends in Audiology The fields of speech-language pathology and audiology are changing all the time. The American Speech-Language Hearing Association is the governing body in charge of the fields of speech-language pathology and audiology. This organization keeps clinicians up to date on current and emerging trends through their website and journal articles. In the June 2008 issue of The ASHA Leader Online, some of these emerging trends were identified and described. For this assignment I decided to mix things up a little bit and focus on audiology! One of the emerging trends in audiology is the use of otoacoustic emissions testing to identify infants who may be at risk for SIDS. This trend was spurred by a study at a children’s hospital in Seattle, Washington. In this research study, doctors examined records of children who died from SIDS in Rhode Island. The researchers chose Rhode Island because the state maintains detailed records of newborn hearing screenings. The study compared 31 infants who died from SIDS to 31 infants that survived to the age of one year. The study found that twelve of the babies who died had different results from their otoacoustic emissions tests than the surviving babies. Normal babies usually have stronger results in their right ear than their left, but the babies who died had test scores of four points lower than the normal babies in their right ears. Otoacoustic emissions testing uses a small probe to test the otoacoustic emissions of the hair cells in the cochlea. This test can easily identify hearing loss in infants because people with normal hearing produce otoacoustic emissions and people with hearing loss do not.  The researchers believe that the cilia in the cochlea communicate with the brain about carbon dioxide levels in the blood and damage to the cilia could disrupt breathing, leading to SIDS. After the study researchers decided, "Newborns at risk for SIDS are currently indistinguishable from other newborns and are only identified following a later fatal event. A unilateral difference in cochlear function is a unique finding that may offer the opportunity to identify infants at risk of SIDS during the early postnatal period with a simple non invasive hearing screen test." I understand that this was a small study, but I think that all babies should undergo otoacoustic emissions screening because the test is non-invasive and it could lead to thousands of babies being saved.

My sources: Click here to see ASHA's list of emerging trends! To learn more about different hearing tests, go here! To learn more about the research on Otoacoustic Emissions screening and SIDS visit this website!