Objective: To evaluate the effect of cochlear implanted's aural/oral rehabilitation using rating evaluation method by questionnaires, to analyze the relationship between rehabilitation effect and its possible influence factors including type of implant, age at surgery, pathology, etc, and to explore the rating questionnaire method for cochlear implanted's aural/oral rehabilitation effect evaluation.
Methods: Ninety-seven pre-lingual cochlear implanted's were involved in this investigation, all of which were severe or profound deafness before implantation. Interviewed the implanted's parents or teachers, asking them to rate the implanted's aural ability objectively from 1 to 8 according to Categories of Auditory Performance (CAP) and speech producing ability from 1 to 5 according to Speech Intelligibility Rating (SIR), then analyzed the relationship between effect of aural/oral rehabilitation represented by CAP/SIR rating results and its possible 9 influence factors including type of implant, age at surgery, pathology, duration of hearing loss, hearing aid wearing, inserting length of electrodes, implanted period, rehabilitation mode and financial conditions. Univariate test and multivariate stepwise logistic regression model were used for the analysis.
Results: In a univariate analysis, it was confirmed that 4 factors i.e. type of implant (P = 0.0439), implanted period (P = 0.0001), rehabilitation mode (P = 0.0460) and financial conditions (0.0140) were correlated to CAP; 2 factors i.e. implanted period (P = 0.0001), rehabilitation mode (P = 0.0271) were correlated to SIR. In a multivariate analysis using stepwise logistic regression model, the more significant influence factor for CAP was implanted period and financial conditions, and for SIR was implanted period.
Conclusions: Cochlear implants will be more effective for aural/oral rehabilitation of implanted's with longer implanted period. Rehabilitation mode and method contribute to the effect of rehabilitation.