Specific risk factors are associated with permanent hearing loss (HL). VLBW infants are known to be at ↑ risk of both permanent HL and neurodevelopmental sequelae. We hypothesized that hypoxemia would be associated with not passing a neonatal OAE hearing screen for VLBW infants and, furthermore, OAE screen results would be associated with neurodevelopmental outcome at 7 mo of age. 166 VLBW infants born 1-1-95 to 12-31-96 were evaluated with OAE and 117 had a neurodevelopmental assessment at 7 mo. 28 infants failed their neonatal OAE in one or both ears. Table

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Infants who failed the OAE had sig. ↓ BW, older test age, ↑ of oxygen and ↓ 5 min APGARs. Also, infants who did not pass the screen had a ↓ seven mo Bayley PDI and a trend for more abn neurologic findings. ↑ reproducibility at 3.2 kHz for the right ear correlated with ↑ BW (r =.38, p<.01), ↑ gest. age (r =.25, p<.01), ↓ age at test (r =-.28, p<.01), ↓ days O2 (r =-.30, p <.01), and ↑ PDI at 7 mos (r=.25, p<.01). In summary, although only 2 of the 28 infants had confirmed permanent hearing loss, these data suggest that hypoxemia is a sig. risk factor for failure of the Neonatal OAE screen, and the OAE findings may be a marker for subsequent neurodevelopmental risk.