Elegant sensory structures in the inner ear have evolved to measure head motion. These vestibular receptors consist of highly conserved semicircular canals and otolith organs. Unlike other senses, vestibular information in the central nervous system becomes immediately multisensory and multimodal. There is no overt, readily recognizable conscious sensation from these organs, yet vestibular sign...

BACKGROUND It is a common occurrence in the balance function laboratory to evaluate patients in the post-acute period following unilateral vestibular system impairment. It is important to be able to differentiate spontaneous nystagmus (SN) emanating from peripheral vestibular system impairments from asymmetric gaze-evoked nystagmus (GEN) that originates from central ocular motility impairment. ...

The vestibular system encodes rotations and translations of the head in space. While much is known about cortical processing of the classical Aristotelian sensory modalities, such as vision and touch, knowledge of how vestibular stimulation is encoded in the human brain is lacking, probably due to the inherent technical difficulties of recording human brain function while providing natural vest...

both the peripheral vestibular system, that is, the labyrinth, and the central vestibular system, is known to influence autonomic function in several ways that have clinical implications. This paper discusses evidence for vestibular influences on autonomic control from normal human subjects, evidence for vestibular influences on autonomic control from patients, clinical implications of vestibul...

Patients with vestibular hypofunction often experience dizziness and unsteadiness while moving their heads. Appropriate sensors can effectively detect a patient's dynamic visual acuity and associated body balance control. Forty-one vestibular-deficit patients and 10 normal individuals were invited to participate in this study. Questionnaires, clinical assessment scales and objective measures we...

Electrocochleography (EcochG), incorporating the Cochlear Microphonic (CM), the Summating Potential (SP), and the cochlear Compound Action Potential (CAP), has been used to study cochlear function in humans and experimental animals since the 1930s, providing a simple objective tool to assess both hair cell (HC) and nerve sensitivity. The vestibular equivalent of ECochG, termed here Electrovesti...

In comparison to other special senses, we are only meagerly informed about the development of vestibular function and the mechanisms that may operate to control or influence the course of vestibular ontogeny. Perhaps one contributing factor to this disparity is the difficulty of evaluating vestibular sense organs directly and noninvasively. The present report describes a recently developed di...

Introduction: Vestibular rehabilitation is a treatment option for the management of vertigo and unsteadiness, which are very common in head trauma patients and more challenging in the early months after trauma. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a vestibular rehabilitation program in the recovery of acute and sub-acute head trauma patients. The goal of this study was evaluation of the ef...

OBJECTIVE Noise has been recognized as a major cause of cochlear damage resulting in both tinnitus and hearing loss. On the other hand, damage to the vestibular system, especially the saccule, can be considered as a potential problem. The cervical vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) have been established as a clinical test of measuring both sac-cular and inferior vestibular nerve fun...

This paper reviews the research findings that support the presence of vestibulospinal reflexes in corrections for head and body instability. Studies of the importance of labyrinthine inputs to the central nervous system organization of eye, head, and body movements demonstrate that the vestibular nuclei are more than a simple relay station for labyrinthine activity. At all levels of the vestibu...