Attention Deficit May Be Hearing Deficit

July 24 -- Hundreds of thousands of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may be incorrectly diagnosed and may instead have trouble deciphering what they are hearing, audiologists say.

Doctors estimate 5 percent of all children have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which translates to about 2 million to 3 million children. Frank Musiek, director of audiology at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., believes many of these youngsters — as many as 2 to 3 percent of all school-age children — may instead have a central auditory processing disorder.

In this disorder — a kind of dyslexia of the ear — the brain misprocesses sounds, says Musiek, who organized a conference of audiologists held this past weekend at Dartmouth College.

“These children can’t distinguish foreground signals from background noise,” Musiek says, likening it to the “cocktail party effect” — when you can’t hear people beside you because of background chatter.

Hard to Distinguish

The common traits of attention deficit disorder — inattention, distraction, hyperactivity — overlap with the behavior of kids with auditory processing disorders, who have difficulty hearing and thus have poor listening skills and trouble following instructions.

“The symptoms can mimic attention deficit disorder,” agrees Robert Sweetow, director of audiology and professor of otolaryngology at University of California at San Francisco. “The kid who can’t sit still — maybe what he’s hearing is so scrambled, he doesn’t give a damn.”

“Auditory processing disorder is a sleeping giant. Not enough people know about it to even consider it,” Musiek says. “Too many people look at these overlapping symptoms and say, ‘It must be AD/HD.’ We’re trying to say, ‘Why not have them evaluated for this as well?’”