Brazilian adaptation of the Functioning after Pediatric Cochlear Implantation (FAPCI): comparison between normal hearing and cochlear implanted children.

OBJECTIVE: Enabling development of the ability to communicate effectively is the principal objective of cochlear implantation (CI) in children. However, objective and effective metrics of communication for cochlear-implanted Brazilian children are lacking. The Functioning after Pediatric Cochlear Implantation (FAPCI), a parent/caregiver reporting instrument developed in the United States, is the first communicative performance scale for evaluation of real-world verbal communicative performance of 2-5-year-old children with cochlear implants. The primary aim was to cross-culturally adapt and validate the Brazilian-Portuguese version of the FAPCI. The secondary aim was to conduct a trial of the adapted Brazilian-Portuguese FAPCI (FAPCI-BP) in normal hearing (NH) and CI children. METHODS: The American-English FAPCI was translated by a rigorous forward-backward process. The FAPCI-BP was then applied to the parents of children with NH (n=131) and CI (n=13), 2-9 years of age. Test-retest reliability was verified. RESULTS: The FAPCI-BP was confirmed to have excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha > 0.90). The CI group had lower FAPCI scores (58.38 ± 22.6) than the NH group (100.38 ± 15.2; p<0.001, Wilcoxon test). CONCLUSION: The present results indicate that the FAPCI-BP is a reliable instrument. It can be used to evaluate verbal communicative performance in children with and without CI. The FAPCI is currently the only psychometrically-validated instrument that allows such measures in cochlear-implanted children.