Liaqat Ali.
Pediatric amplification: audit of 3 years experience in a tertiary care centre.
Pak Paed J Jan ;30(3):136-41.

Objectives: To find out the pattern of use of hearing aids for moderate to profound deafness in a referral center. Design: Prospective study from January 2003 to December, 2005. Settings: Department of Paediatric Audiology, The Children`s Hospital & The Institute of Child Health, Lahore. Materials & Methods.: Various types of 822 hearing aids were fitted to 704 hearing impaired children in the age range of 10 months to 18 years from all districts of the Punjab province excluding mentally retarded while using MS-25 hering aid analyzer for analog hearing aids and Hearing Instrument Programmer (HIPRO) for programming digital hearing aids and different variables were documented for analysis. Results: A total of 704 hearing impaired children were fitted 822 various types of hearing aids. 137 (19.46%) patients were fitted bilateral hearing aids while 548 (80.54%) children were fitted with unilateral hearing aids. 379 (53.84%) users were male and 325 (46.16%) were females. Ages ranged from 10 months to 18 years. 672 (95.45%) hearing aid wearers wore it behind the ear, 22(3.13%) in the canal, 6 (0.85%) at the bone conduction and 4 (0.57%) wore body worn hearing aids. 451 (54.87%) hearing aids were of super power, 144 (17.52%) were of high power, 208 (25.30%) were of medium power and 19 (2.31%) were of low power. 602 (85.51%) hearing aids were fitted using Desired Sensational Level prescriptive method while 102 (14.49%) using National Acoustic Laboratories methods. 365(51.85%) children had a profound degree of hearing loss, 91 (12.93%) had severe degree of hearing loss, 235 (33.38%) moderately severe and 13 (1.84%) had moderate degree hearing loss. Conclusion: It is concluded that analog behind the ear hearing aids with Desired Sensational Level prescriptive method version 5.0 were fitted to most of the profoundly hearing impaired children unilaterally.

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