You may be referred by your GP to an audiologist (hearing specialist) for tests which may include hearing tests, questionnaires, electrode tests (to measure your brain’s reaction to sound), and speech and language tests or cognitive (thinking) assessments. The World Health Organisation estimate that 2–10% of children are affected by APD, which may be caused by regular ear infections, a severe illness at birth, (such as bacterial meningitis), a head injury or a genetic defect (it sometimes runs in families).Īdults may also be affected, as it can develop later in life and may be caused by age-related changes in the processing of sounds in the brain, a head injury, a stroke, a bacterial infection or any disease of the nervous system in which the myelin sheath of nerve cells is damaged. Who is affected and how is auditory processing disorder diagnosed? There is no cure as such, although there are skills that people can develop to better deal with APD. It may affect your ability to pinpoint a sound (localise where a sound is coming from), tell which sound comes before another, distinguish similar sounds from one another (such as “hard” and “heart”) or enjoy music. With APD, it may be difficult to understand speech when there’s background noise, if more than one person is speaking at a time, if the person is speaking quickly, or if the sound quality is poor (for example: over a loudspeaker or in an echoey room).

What are the symptoms of auditory processing disorder? This means that although the ears are working fine, the brain cannot process what it hears. APD is a problem converting these electrical impulses into meaning.ĪPD can affect both children and adults, whether they have any hearing impairment or not. Your inner ear is responsible for converting sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to your brain. Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a listening problem caused by the brain not processing sounds in the normal way.

Auditory processing problems