Abstract

Objectives: Many pregnant Muslim women fast daily during the daylight hours of the Holy month of Ramadan. Some studies have suggested that an impoverished diet during pregnancy affects the birth weight and the development of their off springs. This study was designed to determine whether Ramadan fasting by pregnant women had a long-term effect on the auditory processing abilities of their children. Moreover, this will have a great impact upon the listening abilities, language development and learning skills of these children.

Methods: A retrospective observational study was performed. Children were classified into two groups. The first group, contained children with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), while the second group was made up of normal children. Basic audiological evaluation (pure tone audiometry, speech audiometry and tympanometry) as well as behavioral psychophysical central auditory tests (low pass filtered speech test for children, speech in noise test, dichotic digits test, gap in noise test and auditory memory subtests) were completed on both groups. In addition, a history of Ramadan fasting of the mothers was explored in both groups.

Results: There was no statistically significant difference between either the Control and Study groups regarding history of Ramadan fasting. Moreover, insignificant difference was also found between children of fasting and non-fasting mothers in APD group regarding the central auditory processing test results. According to the history of Ramadan fasting of the mothers in both groups, each group was subdivided into two subgroups (subgroup A: children with positive history of maternal fasting during Ramadan and subgroup B: children with negative history of maternal fasting during Ramadan).

Conclusion: Ramadan fasting during pregnancy does not adversely affect central auditory processing after the birth of the off springs.

Keywords: Ramadan Fasting; Maternal Fasting; Auditory Processing Disorder; Off Springs

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Citation

Citation: Tayseer Taha Abdel Rahman., et al. “The Effect of Ramadan Fasting During Pregnancy on an Offspring’s Central Auditory Processing: A Retrospective Study on Children Suffering from Auditory Processing Disorders". Acta Scientific Otolaryngology 2.3 (2020): 15-20.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Tayseer Taha Abdel Rahman., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.