Diagnostic tests for children with auditory processing disorder

Funding from Deafness Research UK has enabled Dr Justin Cowan at the Institute of Child Health and Oxford University to carry out a study into the better diagnosis of auditory processing disorder (APD).

[Small project grant, 2006-2007]

APD is thought to affect as many as 10 per cent of children in the UK. The condition is sometimes diagnosed when children are found to have difficulty in listening despite showing normal hearing in audiological tests.

The aim of the project was to produce a comprehensive battery of audiological, cognitive and psychoacoustic measures to test for APD. Having gathered normative data for these measures on over 75 children the team set out to fully characterise the nature of the impairments shown by children clinically diagnosed with the disorder.

Patients with a clinical diagnosis of APD were identified from Great Ormond Street Hospital and a set of tests was administered that were designed to identify auditory processing deficits in children.

The core finding of the study was that the sample of children who had received a clinical diagnosis of APD showed a disparate and varied range of cognitive and behavioural difficulties. Though performance on tests of auditory processing was markedly poor in some children diagnosed with APD, there was often concurrent poor performance on tests of memory and attention which may have contributed to the auditory processing deficits.

The implications of these findings is that the clinical assessment of children with suspected auditory processing difficulties needs to be multi-disciplinary if it is to provide a comprehensive picture of the child’s abilities and underlying problems.