BBC NEWS | Health | Hearing tests ‘key for language’
Detecting hearing impairment in babies early can improve their language ability later, a study suggests.
No, really???
Sometimes I despair. Is there a pot of money going around that I could tap into and do research and then state something painfully obvious at the end of it? And don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% behind universal neonatal hearing tests, both my children were tested shortly after birth. (Took about 6 weeks to get Small organised as he was a home birth, Big was tested within 24 hours.) This is because I am partially deaf, but it wasn’t identified until I was 5. I have a hearing aid kicking around somewhere, but it doesn’t work any more. Must get it sorted out sometime.
I’m just not behind doing research to prove something that everyone knows. Couldn’t we spend the money on actually helping ppl instead of talking about it?
Comments
8 responses to “BBC NEWS | Health | Hearing tests 'key for language'”
I could hear the sarcasm in your voice from here.
About 10 years ago in one of the western states, a $150,000 study was carried out to find out whether the sound of jets taking off and landing disturbed horses.
More recently, the government spent $500K advertising that beginning on such and such a date they were no longer going to be charging a fee for such and such a service. When really, how long would it take for word to get around that it wasn’t being charged anymore.
http://patchofpuddles.co.uk/?p=1200
Remember the coffee one?
My personal favourite is the study a couple of months ago that found that tiredness could be effectively helped by getting more sleep.
Yep far better for the NHS to spend resources providing screening that had not been proved conclusively to be beneficial and without an understanding of the longterm benefits of using scarce resources in such a way.
And the Wellcome Trust, as a charity, can spend its money researching what it likes. Without the WT the amount of ‘helping ppl’ would be a lot less than left to the MRC, DOH. That said they do have very high thresholds of peer-review for awarding funding in the first place.
From the above article
“Gwen Carr, director of UK services for the National Deaf Children’s Society, said she welcomed the research, which backs earlier studies showing the longer-term benefits of early screening.”
So it appears that this research had been done before. To the best of my knowledge it *has* been proved conclusively that hearing screening is a good thing, and that the test they were using previously (infant distraction test) was a complete waste of time for all concerned.
Well from personal experience I doubt very much that the Wellcome Trust would fund research into a question that has already been answered conculsively. Similarly the NEJM is unlikely to publish work that simply duplicates earlier work (the NEJM is a very influential journal). It is of course possible that there are various different long-term benefits; this report for example is about language skills. There are often studies that suggest a potential benefit where further studies are required to conclusively prove the output of earlier ones that for one reason or another can’t be viewed as definitive – group-size etc.
Notwithstanding the above what I dislike about this sort of discussion is the suggestion (possibly unintentional but the reason I get annoyed) that people who work in academia (who generally are poorly paid on short-term contracts with very little job security) do so to state the bleedin’ obvious, rather than actually being a very committed group of people seeking definitive answers to questions that are important to the well-being of society.
“I’m just not behind doing research to prove something that everyone knows.” Well, everyone used to *know* that the world was flat and that the sun went around the Earth 😉 As well as many many more total fallacies! Just because something is a received truth, or sounds like it makes sense, doesn’t always actually make it true.
Also from the above article – “[Dr Colin Kennedy] said that until now it had not been certain whether universal screening of newborn babies for hearing impairment had any effect on the child’s later verbal abilities”!
And the conclusion in the abstract of the NEJM articlestates that “Early detection of childhood hearing impairment was associated with higher scores for language [as compared to nonverbal ability] but not for speech in midchildhood”, which doesn’t seem particularly obvious to me. Thought that was quite interesting and rather counterintuitive.
The Southampton press release is a bit more informative than the BBC article too.