According to the preliminary statistics of the Second National Sample Survey of Persons with Disabilities, there are 800,000 hearing-impaired children aged 0-6 in China, and 30,000 new children are added every year. Hearing loss in children is divided into conductive hearing loss and sensorineural hearing loss, conductive hearing loss can be recovered with the growth and development of the child or through active treatment, while sensorineural hearing loss, i.e. neurological deafness, is mostly due to irreversible damage to the cochlear nerve and auditory nerve. The Children’s Hearing Center of Guangzhou Women’s and Children’s Medical Center is the designated referral unit for hearing screening in Guangdong Province and the hearing assessment partner of Guangdong Disabled Persons’ Federation, and receives more than 20,000 hearing tests every year. When should I go back for a review? Newborn hearing screening is to identify children with hearing loss early, intervene early, and restore hearing to help them learn language. Hearing screening includes initial screening and re-screening. Initial screening is done within 2-5 days of birth, and if the initial screening does not pass, re-screening should be done within 42 days of birth. Parents do not need to be nervous if the screening does not pass. The reason for this is that in addition to possible hearing damage, it may be due to cerumen blocking the external ear canal, or middle ear function not being well developed, or delayed myelination of the auditory nerve due to individual differences, while the latter factors can be fully restored to normal hearing. Therefore, it is important to be evaluated by a hearing center in a timely manner to clarify the diagnosis. 2. How old should a child be for a hearing test to confirm the diagnosis? The diagnosis of hearing loss depends on a formal and comprehensive hearing evaluation. The first hearing evaluation should be performed at a designated referral unit or a large general hospital when the baby is 3 months old. 3. How should children with different degrees of neurological deafness be treated? Hearing classification criteria: Normal hearing (0-25 dB) using the average hearing threshold of pure tone audiometry as a reference standard. Hearing loss is divided into five levels: mild (26-40 dB), moderate (41-55 dB), moderately severe (56-70 dB), severe (71-90 dB), and very severe (>91 dB). The current interventions are mainly hearing aids and cochlear implants. Hearing aids are devices that help to hear sound, which amplify the sound signal to varying degrees and then deliver it to the ear to compensate for the lost hearing; they are suitable for moderate to moderately severe hearing loss and are less effective in helping very severe hearing loss, which requires surgical implantation of a cochlear implant. The cochlear implant functions by replacing the diseased inner ear hair cells to produce hearing through direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve and is indicated for severe and profound sensorineural deafness. For children with severe hearing loss, either hearing aids or cochlear implants must be combined with auditory speech and language rehabilitation. “Early detection of deafness, early intervention, and early auditory speech rehabilitation are especially important for children. Parents should not have the wrong idea that their children are still young and should be fitted with hearing aids when they grow up, thus delaying their children’s precious and limited time to learn to speak. 4. When is the best time to treat neurological deafness in children? Depending on the degree of hearing loss, the intervention time for neurological deafness varies. For mild hearing loss, the need for hearing aids will be assessed at 1-1/2 years of age based on the child’s language development. For moderate hearing loss, appropriate hearing aids can be considered around 6 months of age. For severe and profound hearing loss, hearing aids or cochlear implants should be worn as soon as possible. The age for cochlear implant surgery is generally after 1 year old, but special circumstances can be advanced. 5. When do I need a cochlear implant? What is the best age for a cochlear implant? Cochlear implantation is needed to restore hearing to children with severe to profound hearing loss, as hearing aids often cannot meet the needs of children for language learning. Children with cochlear implants after the age of 5 have significantly lower language development than children with cochlear implants before the age of 3, and often need to attend specialized language training schools to help with language learning and correct pronunciation. 6. How long does cochlear implantation require auditory speech rehabilitation training? Depending on the age of the cochlear implant and the language and intellectual development before implantation, the time required for auditory speech rehabilitation varies, but the general rule is: the younger the age of the implant, the shorter the time required for auditory speech rehabilitation. Generally speaking, children with prelingual deafness who have cochlear implants before the age of 3 can learn language under the careful instruction of their parents, and if they can be trained with professional language rehabilitation, they can learn language even better; children with prelingual deafness after the age of 5 must be trained with professional language rehabilitation for a longer period of time before they can achieve better results.