Pei-Chen Tsao
Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan
Title: Maternal, perinatal, and postnatal predisposing factors of hearing deficit in full-term children: A matched case–control study
Biography
Biography: Pei-Chen Tsao
Abstract
Introduction: Studies on risk factors for childhood hearing deficit (HD) are usually based on questionnaires or small sample sizes. Therefore we conducted a nationwide population-based case–control study to comprehensively analyze the maternal, perinatal, and postnatal risk factors for HD in full-term children.
Methods: We retrieved data from three nationwide databases related to maternal characteristics, perinatal comorbidities, and postnatal characteristics and adverse events. We used 1:5 propensity score matching to include 12,873 full-term children with HD and 64,365 age-, sex-, and enrolled year-matched controls. Conditional logistic regression was used to evaluate the risk factors for HD.
Results: Among the various maternal factors, maternal HD (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 8.09, 95% confidence interval [95%CI]: 7.16–9.16) and type 1 diabetes (aOR: 3.79, 95%CI: 1.98–7.24) had the highest odds of childhood hearing impairment. The major perinatal risk factors for childhood hearing impairment included ear malformations (aOR: 58.78, 95%CI: 37.5–92.0) and chromosomal anomalies (aOR: 6.70, 95%CI: 5.25–8.55), and the major postnatal risk factors included meningitis (aOR: 2.08, 95%CI: 1.18–3.67) and seizure (aOR: 3.71, 95%CI: 2.88–4.77). Other factors included acute otitis media, postnatal ototoxic drug use, and congenital infections.
Conclusions: Many risk factors for childhood HD identified in our study are preventable, such as congenital infection, meningitis, ototoxic drug use, and some maternal comorbidities. Accordingly, more effort is required to prevent and control the severity of maternal comorbidities during pregnancy, initiate genetic diagnostic evaluation for high-risk children, and aggressive screening for neonatal infections.