By Alisha Lambeth Jones, Au.D., Ph.D.

Nearly 380,000 preterm births or deliveries prior to 37 weeks are recorded annually in the United States. It is also estimated that 15 million preterm births occur globally each year. Recent reports indicate the prevalence of preterm births continues to rise, impacting as many as 1 in 10 infants. According to information acquired from 2015 to 2017, premature birth rates are 49 to 50 percent higher in African American women (14 percent) when compared with Caucasian women (9 percent), indicating the presence of a health disparity issue.

The probability of substantial health issues and long- term disabilities increases as gestation at the time of birth decreases. If the effects of prematurity on children’s development of auditory skills are better understood, hearing healthcare professionals will be able to provide more individualized intervention recommendations and improve long-term outcomes for children born prematurely.

In our August 2020 paper in The Hearing Journal, we review causes of prematurity and the typical development of the auditory system. The sensory system, which includes the auditory system, develops in a very specific way inside the womb. This process is interrupted and occurs differently when development continues outside of the womb due to a premature birth. Specifically, exposure to frequencies of sounds, noise, and noise levels is very different within the neonatal intensive care unit. Information on this topic is critical for audiologists to know because this early sensory interruption can affect the brain’s ability to process sound. This can have long lasting consequences for those children born prematurely and can include central auditory processing disorders for this special population.

We examined central auditory processing skills in adolescents ages 12 to 15 years with a premature birth history. Those skills were then compared with their age-matched peers who have a full-term birth history. The central auditory processing skills accessed in that project included binaural integration (combining information coming from both ears); binaural separation (listening to one message, while ignoring a competing message); binaural interaction (detecting where sounds are coming from); rapid speech (speech that is fast and distorted); temporal patterning (distinguishing sound patterns); temporal resolution (separating gaps or sounds from each other); speech-in-noise (understanding speech in the presence of background noise); and auditory memory (repeating what is heard).

Major findings from our study are that adolescents who were born prematurely had significant difficulties with central auditory processing skills in the areas of binaural integration and speech-in-noise. Our research is ongoing and being assessed in other pediatric age groups. A major recommendation of this paper is early monitoring of central auditory processing skills by audiologists for this population of prematurely born children.

A 2018 ERG scientist generously funded by the General Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International, Alisha Lambeth Jones, Au.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor in the department of communication disorders at Auburn University in Alabama.