What should I do to prepare my child for a hearing screening? Young children who are found to have a hearing impairment or who do not pass the postnatal hearing screening need to undergo a systematic audiological examination as soon as possible to diagnose the hearing impairment. These exams usually involve an evaluation of the child’s middle and inner ear as well as the function of the auditory nerve and take at least 1 to 2 hours. During the examination, the child must be asleep. Therefore, it is important to prepare for the examination. The day before the examination, parents can reduce the child’s sleep time (sleep late and wake up early) to make him/her sleepy before the examination, so that he/she can fall asleep easily with the sedative effect of medication. 2, 1 hour before the examination is best not to eat and drink too much. 3, in preparation for the examination 30 minutes before the child needs to be given oral sedation, the most commonly used drug is 10% chloral hydrate solution. Parents need to prepare the child’s drinking water, bottles, milk powder (or breast milk), diapers, change of clothes and other items for backup. Chloral hydrate has a bitter taste, so you can prepare some sweet snacks for your baby in advance to make him/her take the drug faster. 4.After taking chloral hydrate orally, you should try to eat less milk, drink less water and beverages to avoid the concentration of the drug being diluted, which will affect the effectiveness of the drug. 5, for children who are not convenient to take chloral hydrate orally, you can also take the way to retain the enema. It is necessary to let the child defecate before giving the drug to avoid affecting the effect of drug absorption. 6. Discomfort symptoms such as dizziness may occur after the use of chloral hydrate, so parents should closely monitor the child after the examination and not let him/her walk by himself/herself to prevent accidents such as falls. Why should sedation be used during audiological examinations of infants and children? This is because the audiological examination takes a long time and no physical activity can occur during the process. Sometimes subtle movements such as blinking or turning the head may affect the judgment and accuracy of the test results. Young children usually cannot cooperate as actively as adults, so sedation and hypnosis before the examination is important. In addition, after the hearing examination, CT and MRI examinations are needed to determine the cause of the hearing impairment and to determine whether there are inner ear malformations, cerebral white matter dystrophy, or auditory nerve malformations. Sedative medications are also needed for young children who are unable to cooperate. Does chloral hydrate affect the baby’s health? Chloral hydrate is a hypnotic, anticonvulsant drug that can induce sleep in children within 30 minutes of taking a hypnotic dose, causing near physiological sleep. This drug has a mild hypnotic effect and no significant adverse effects, and is currently the sedative-hypnotic drug routinely used for audiological examinations of children in China. Due to possible individual differences between each child, some adverse reactions may occur in individual children at the same dose, including: irritation of the gastric mucosa, possible drowsiness, hypothermia; may cause seizures; may have difficulty swallowing, shortness of breath or difficulty, slow heart rate, severe weakness; overdose may impair liver and kidney function and may produce transient jaundice and urine protein during recovery; Occasionally, allergic rash, urticaria occurs. Therefore, for premature infants, low weight infants or those with heart disease, liver disease, febrile diseases, and idiopathic conditions, medication should be administered under the guidance of the relevant specialist to reduce the incidence of their adverse reactions.