Screening, rubella vaccination, and childhood hearing impairment in Taiwan.
Big-government health moves can shrink or swell the pool of hearing-impaired toddlers you serve.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lai et al. (2014) looked at every child born in Taiwan from 1993 to 2007.
They counted how many kids got hearing loss each year.
They also checked when Taiwan pushed hearing tests and when rubella shots went up.
What they found
Hearing loss in kids rose fast after 2003, when free baby hearing tests started.
After 2006, cases dropped when more moms got rubella shots before pregnancy.
The data show public-health moves can swing how many kids enter early-intervention caseloads.
How this fits with other research
Smith et al. (2010) used the same kind of big-registry trick. They counted pills, Der-Chung counted ears.
Hithersay et al. (2014) say carers can run health checks, but no one has tested a carer-led hearing-watch program yet.
Lee et al. (2022) also pull large data sets for risk factors, yet they look at teens and exercise, not babies and ears.
All four papers show the same tool—national registries—can guide where BCBAs spend time.
Why it matters
If you work with birth-to-three kids, watch local vaccination and newborn-screen news. A rubella push or new hearing-test rule can change your referral list in six months. Track the trends so you are ready to screen language delays earlier and staff your early-intervention teams smartly.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Childhood hearing impairment (CHI) is a major developmental disability, but data at the national level are limited, especially those on the changes in the prevalence over time. In Taiwan, the government began to certify disabled residents for providing various services in 1980 and maintains a registry of certified cases, which provides a rare opportunity for studying the trends of CHI prevalence. Using the registry data, we estimated the prevalence of CHI by age and severity and explored factors affecting its changes over time. From 2000 to 2011, the registered cases under 17 years old ranged from 3427 to 4075. The overall prevalence increased from 2000 to 2006, but then decreased till 2011. While the prevalence of mild CHI increased over the years, such a pattern was not observed in moderate or severe CHI. In general, the overall prevalence increased over the years in the age groups <3 years, 3-5 years, and 6-11 years (p<0.01), and the largest increase was observed in the age group <3 years, particularly after the promotion of screening by the government in 2003. The decrease after 2006 was mainly attributable to decreases in the age groups 12-14 (with a decreasing trend from 2001, p<0.01) and 15-17 years (with a decreasing trend from 2004, p<0.01). The timing was related to the implementation of a nationwide rubella vaccination program. Similar decreases had been observed in countries with rubella vaccination programs.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.07.051