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To the Editor: Dr Thompson and colleagues¹ concluded that universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) can identify newborns with permanent hearing loss earlier than otherwise possible, but they found no conclusive evidence that such early identification leads to long-term improvements in language skills. States (such as Florida) that have relatively new mandates for infant hearing screening need to provide statistics to their respective departments of health from their programs, which would provide more data in this regard.

In their literature review the authors critique various articles as "poor" that appear to be credible, and which support UNHS and the earliest identification of deafness as the key to improved speech and language and cognition. These authors' estimates of probabilities fly in the face of clinical experience with late identification of deafness. One does not need to be a physician or statistician to know that the earlier the identification of hearing impairment is . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Universal Newborn Hearing Screening: Summary of Evidence
Diane C. Thompson, Heather McPhillips, Robert L. Davis, Tracy A. Lieu, Charles J. Homer, and Mark Helfand
JAMA. 2001;286(16):2000-2010.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT