Vestibular functions in motion sickness susceptible individuals

Abstract

There exists no functional guide that can serve as a diagnostic tool for individual susceptibility to motion sickness (MS). We evaluated vestibular system functioning via a caloric test (which assesses functioning of the superior vestibular nerve) and the vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (VEMP) test (which assesses inferior vestibular nerve functioning) in 20 MS susceptible and 20 nonsusceptible individuals. Susceptibility to MS was determined by self-declaration and with MS susceptibility questionnaire and Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAS). We found statistically significant differences for scores on the MS susceptibility questionnaire and HAS questionnaire; however, we found no correlation between VEMP and caloric test results. We suggest that VEMP and caloric test results are not affected by individuals' susceptibility to MS. We could not find vestibular system deficits using the VEMP and caloric test combination. Our findings do not support vestibular function asymmetry in MS patients.

Assessment of otolith function using cervical and ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potentials in individuals with motion sickness

“…The results revealed no difference between the groups for cVEMP and oVEMP amplitudes. The findings of the present study are in agreement with those by Tal et al (2007) and Buyuklu, Tarhan and Ozluoglu (2009) for cVEMP and Xie et al (2012) for oVEMP. However, these findings are in dissonance with those reported by Tal et al (2006).…”

“…The findings of present study are in agreement with those reported previously (Tal et al 2006(Tal et al , 2007Buyuklu, Tarhan, and Ozluoglu 2009). Although they did not use PD as a separate group, they reported a lack of significant difference in the latencies of cVEMP between MS and NS.…”

“…In the present study, MS showed significantly higher asymmetry ratio than PD and NS. The findings of the present study are in dissonance with those reported previously for cVEMP (Tal et al 2006(Tal et al , 2007Buyuklu, Tarhan, and Ozluoglu 2009) and oVEMP (Xie et al 2012), who reported no significant difference in asymmetry ratio between motion sickness susceptible and non-susceptible individuals. However, these previous studies did reveal a tendency for higher asymmetry ratio in the motion sickness susceptible group than the non-susceptible group, although statistical significance was not attained.…”

“…Due to this, the authors themselves caution against generalisation of the findings to the entire population. In a more recent study, the authors did not find a statistically significant difference in any of the cVEMP parameters between the motion sickness susceptible and non-susceptible groups (Buyuklu, Tarhan, and Ozluoglu 2009). Thus, the above set of studies point towards incongruence regarding the effectiveness of cVEMP in revealing saccular dysfunction, if any, in individuals with motion sickness.…”

Ocular Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials and Motion Sickness Susceptibility

“…They found that the group susceptible to seasickness exhibited a signifi cantly higher cVEMP threshold and a signifi cantly lower peak-to-peak P13-N23 amplitude interval compared with the group not susceptible to seasickness. However, in contrast to their study, Buyuklu et al ( 5 ) did not fi nd a statistically signifi cant difference in cVEMP parameters of subjects between MS susceptible individuals and non-MS susceptible individuals. Their fi ndings appear not to support saccular otolith function asymmetry in MS patients.…”