Hearing abilities and language development in anemic children of a public daycare center.

BACKGROUND

the relationship between anemia and development.

AIM: to compare the auditory and language development in anemic and non-anemic children, with ages ranging from three to six years, of a public daycare center in Belo Horizonte city.

METHOD: a transversal study; blind case and control format. A digital puncture was performed in all children to detect iron-deficiency anemia (hemoglobin = 11.3g/dL). The research group was composed of 19 anemic children and the control group of 38 healthy children, selected through randomized paired sampling. The children's hearing was evaluated through otoacoustic emissions, tympanometry and a simplified evaluation of the central auditory processing was performed. The language development of each child was observed using the behavior observation guidelines for children with ages from zero to six years. Performance indexes were created in order to classify the language responses of the children.

RESULTS

the groups did not differ in terms of age, gender, breast-feeding and mother's literacy. The following variables presented statistically significant differences: hemoglobin values (10.6g/dL, 12.6g/dL); presence of the acoustic reflex (63%, 92%); reception performance indexes (72.8, 90.1); emission (50.6, 80.6) and cognitive aspects of language (47.8, 76.0) in anemic and non-anemic children respectively. The hearing abilities in the verbal and non-verbal sequential memory and the sonorous localization were inadequate in most of the children, especially in those with anemia.

CONCLUSION

anemic children differed statically from non-anemic children in terms of alterations in the acoustic reflex and language development and also presented a higher prevalence of alterations in the hearing evaluation.