Why are APD Evaluations Important?
The area of APD is often overlooked, unknown, or in most cases misdiagnosed. With a high prevalence of 1 in 10 school-aged kids being impacted by APD, this can be the missing puzzle piece causing delays and the inability to progress in other neuro-developmental areas.
Undiagnosed and untreated APD can lead to heavy impacts on your child’s success in school, self-esteem, and personal relationships. An APD Evaluation can be the answer to your child’s struggles.
APD Evaluations help to promote appropriate educational planning, implement interventions such as environmental modifications, classroom adaptations, and APD management strategies (changing the learning or communication environment and recruiting higher-order skills to help compensate for the disorder) identify assistive listening device technology as needed (i.e., FM System Devices), and finally determine if there are clinical aspects of the disorder that require treatment.
Our licensed Audiologists are trained in the differential diagnosis of Auditory Processing Disorders and provide a specialized battery of tests specifically used to diagnose the specific type of APD your child may have.
At Best Hearing San Diego, APD evaluations begin with a peripheral hearing examination to ensure that your child’s difficulties and deficits are not caused by a structural hearing issue. Many children with APD also have normal hearing but still continue to have difficulty understanding and keeping up with speech, especially in background noise.
APD Screenings can be done on children as young as five years old and complete APD Evaluations can be performed at age 7 and up. This complete diagnostic evaluation assesses six different processes in the Central Nervous System. Testing involves the use of audio materials presented through earphones inside a sound-treated booth. The APD diagnostic test battery is broken down into 5-6 categories of tests which isolate the specific discrete auditory skills involved in Auditory Processing
There are several different types of auditory processing deficits and because each child is an individual, APD may manifest itself in a variety of different ways. Thus, the key to appropriate treatment is accurate and careful diagnosis by an audiologist. Therefore, once a deficit-specific diagnosis has been made, the nature of the disorder can be determined and a unique, individual treatment plan can be designed.