3|RESULTS
Finally, the LVAS group was composed of 70 children (boys, 58.57%) with a median age of 28.50 months (range 6-72 months) (TABLE 1). As TABLE 1 shown that the hearing thresholds of ASSR and behavior audiometry were both belong to the profound hearing loss. The difference between binaural hearing was 13.57±13.27 dB nHL with 54.29% of symmetric binaural hearing rate. 70 gender-, age-, and auditory- matched children were recruited as non-LVAS group. As TABLE 1 shown that, there was no significant difference in gender(P= .396), age(P= .959), and auditory level (all P> .05) between the two groups.
Compared with the normal developmental criteria of 85 score in Gesell schedule, LVAS children and non-LVAS children both had developmental delay (TABLE 1, FIGURE 2). For LVAS children, the delay occurred in full-dimensional developments including gross motor, fine motor, adaptability, language, and social skill (all P< .05) (FIGURE2). Whereas, for non-LVAS group, the delay didn’t occurre in gross motor(P= .199) (FIGURE 2).
Dividing the development results into four gradings (as shown in TABLE 2), for the above two groups, in terms of overall developments, majority of children were both distributed in mild neurological damage, similar distributions were found in the sub-developments of fine motor, language, adaptability, and social skill. Whereas, in gross motor, majority of children had the near-normal developments. The specific and detailed distribution rates were shown in TABLE 2. According to the above results, the language development was the worst, followed by social skills, adaptability, and fine motor, whereas gross motor was the best (TABLE 1-2, FIGURE 2).
Then, the developments were compared between the LVAS and non-LVAS groups. There was no difference in developments score including all sub-dimensional developments (all P> .05) (TABLE1, FIGURE 3) and similar results were found in the grading of developmental level (all P> .05) (TABLE 2). Although the difference results in gross motor in comparison with normal criteria, there was no significant difference between the two groups(P= .673) (TABLE1, FIGURE 3).
Subsequently, the multivariate linear regression was performed to assess the relative contributions of corresponding variables to developments of LVAS children. The results showed that only age was the related factors to overall development (B =-.253, P< .05) including sub-developments of gross motor, adaptability and social skill (all B <0, all P< .05) (TABLE 3). In order to explore the effect of age on the developments, LVAS subjects were divided into three groups: 6-12 months, 12-36 months and 36-72 months. Developmental scores of these three groups were provided in TABLE 4. Compared among the three age groups, significant differences were found in overall development (P= .001) including sub-developments of adaptability, language and social skill (allP< .05) but not in gross and fine motor (allP> .05). We further made multiple comparisons in any two age groups. In gross and fine motor, there appeared significant difference in 6-12 months’ and 12-36 months’ group (allP< .05). In addition, compared with 6-12 months’ group, the overall development in 12-36 months and 12-36 months’ group had lower developmental scores (P= .022, P= .003, respectively), whereas, there was no significant difference between 12-36 months and 12-36 months’ group (P= .205). Similar results appeared in fine motor and adaptability (all P< .05) (TABLE 4).