The utilization and demographic characteristics of in-hospital rehabilitation for acute vestibular neuritis in Japan.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the utilization and demographic characteristics of in-hospital rehabilitation for patients with acute vestibular neuritis using the Japan Medical Data Center (JMDC) database.

METHODS

We gathered information on patients that were at least 20 years of age who were admitted with a diagnosis of VN (ICD-10 code: H81.2). We defined in-hospital rehabilitation service use as payment of insurance claims for at least one session of rehabilitation during admission.

RESULTS

We identified 809 patients that were eligible for this study; among these, 59 patients (7.3%) received rehabilitation while 750 patients did not. The median total time spent and the median time per day in inpatient rehabilitation were 140 min and 11.7 min, respectively. Factors that significantly affected the rehabilitation service use, in order of greater odds, were primary care, internal medicine, and age in multivariate logistic regression analysis (odds ratio = 4.42, 2.17, 1.33, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS

This study showed that (1) utilization of rehabilitation services by acute patients with VN was low; and (2) age, admission to internal medicine, and admission to primary care were associated with the use of rehabilitation services.