Antibiotics blamed for child deafness
One child a week is being made deaf by treatment with antibiotics and many more may suffer damage to their hearing, doctors report today.
The serious side-effect occurs among children with a pre-existing sensitivity to powerful antibiotics widely used in premature baby units to treat infections.
The discovery by researchers at the Institute of Child Health in London triggered calls yesterday for a national screening programme for pregnant women to detect babies at risk.
An estimated 20,000 premature babies are treated each year with the powerful antibiotics, called aminoglycosides. The drugs are also used to tackle infections in children with cancer and chronic illnesses such as cystic fibrosis, and in adults. Genetic specialists at the Institute of Child Health, who reviewed blood samples from over 9,000 children, found one in 500 had a genetic mutation that made them vulnerable to aminoglycosides.
The antibiotics are "broad spectrum" drugs – they tackle a wide range of infections – which are given in hospitals by injection. They are not prescribed by GPs and there is no risk from other antibiotics.
Maria Bitner-Glindzicz, consultant geneticist at the institute who led the study, published as a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, said: "All [the affected children] are permanently deaf. It is possible there are more children with a lesser degree of hearing loss who have not come to the notice of doctors. Adults can also be affected. If you have this mutation and get this class of antibiotics, they have this rapid and extreme effect."
Dr Bitner-Glindzicz said children likely to need treatment with aminoglycosides, such as those with cancer or cystic fibrosis, should be screened so that those with the genetic mutation could be offered a different drug. But in most cases, very sick children must be treated immediately with antibiotics. "Waiting for a gene test may sometimes not be clinically right, particularly on neonatal units. Universal pre-natal testing of mothers should be considered for this reason," she said.
The antibiotics have been available for decades and are cheap and effective, but the precise nature of the risk they posed has been misunderstood.
The full article is featured in today's Independent, with the case study of eight year-old Laila MacDougall who has profound irreversible hearing loss following repeated courses of aminoglycosides when she had chemotherapy at the age of two.
Laila now has a cochlear implant which gives her rudimentary hearing and she uses sign language.
Read the full article at the Independent.
Comments
I am a high school senior and my hearing impairment was caused by this antibiotic. I was born 2 months premature, and they found out before I was to be released after spending 1 1/2 months in the hospitals NICU that I was profoundly deaf. And now that I am older, my hearing is still declineing, and I have been told it always will till there is nothing else to lose. I am now severely profound deaf, and waiting on implants. I have been using hearing aids all 17 1/2 years of my life. I speak orally. But it is still very hard to understand others talking. So I am glad to read this article but it is heartbreaking for all of the others that have to go through it. But I wouldn't change my being H.O.H. for anything, it is who I am.
Posted by: JoEllen | February 9, 2009 08:36 AM