Development, validity and clinical testing of the authors’ technique for the assessment of implant prosthesis quality in older adults and elderly patients
Relevance. The studies which assess the quality of the implant-supported prostheses in elderly patients as well as the impact of the immediate loading on the peri-implant bone are scarce and inconclusive. Various automatic assessment software is known and applied in the clinic. A compact, informative and flexible software is obviously necessary for daily use and continuous control of the quality of the prosthetic treatment. The aim of studies was to improve the automatic quality assessment of implant prostheses in older adults and elderly patients.Materials and methods. 408 responders (151 male and 257 female subjects) aged from 54 to 85 (mean age 73.9 ± 4.9) participated in the clinical testing of the ROZA questionnaire. The conceptual (construct) validity included convergent, divergent and discriminant subtypes. In convergent validity, comparison with a battery of equivalent tests with similar requirements was used: Geriatric Oral Health Assessment Index (GOHAI), Oral Health Impact Profile-14 (OHIP-14) questionnaire, visual analogue scale (VAS) set and two related expert prosthesis quality assessment programs TREVOL and TRESIM. Results. Cronbach’s alpha, that confirms reliability and internal stability of the studied instrument, was 0.82 which is a good level. The correlation of the authors’ technique was low and insignificant (r = 0.242; p = 0.257) compared to the discriminant tests, which demonstrated the target focus of the studied technique.Conclusion. The studied questionnaire ROZA was highly sensitive, reliable for the examination of elderly patients with different implant-supported prostheses. It can be used to assess the quality of the prostheses in elderly, among others to evaluate the quality of the prosthetic treatment.