Timothy C. Hain, MD and Marcello Cherchi, M.D, Ph.D. of Chicago Dizziness and Hearing
Page last modified: July 29, 2022
Click off symptoms on these web forms to see if one fits the published criteria for PPPD, MdDS, or vestibular migraine.
men_new -- Proof that this new treatment (SPI-1005) works is presently a bit scanty. Still, hope springs eternal ... See the review.
Recent advances in autoimmune inner ear disease: (11/7/2020)
- Data is emerging about use of intratympanic TNF-α inhibitors.
Our Meniere's page was ranked as the most reliable web page on Meniere's, by an article in an Otolaryngology journal evaluating 50 web sites on Meniere's disease (Bojrab et al, 2020). Our score for reliability was 2.96, compared to (for example), Mayo clinic's page which scored 2.63 (which was Google ranked #1). The maximum score is 3. We suspect if other pages on our site were ranked similarly, they would also score at the top for reliability because of our practice of supplying evidence for almost all factual statements, and separating opinion from evidence. We have recently seen pages from major institutions making rather outrageous claims -- we think because the pages are being edited by persons who are good at web design, but perhaps not experts in dizziness. Some pages from academic ins it ut ions even make explicit disclaimers that they are not responsible for the content on their site.
Ranking of pages by Google is based more on suitability for serving advertisements than content. Most pages must be "mobile ready", meaning that you should be able to look up -- lets say -- Meniere's disease, on your cellphone. So we are basically comparing content with the reliability score, with appearance (which is a huge portion of the Google score), with appearance winning over reliable information.
Chicago Dizziness and Hearing has a gigantic clinical database containing about 30,000 patient records going back to 1990, mainly concerning conditions including dizziness. We recently have developed tools to explore this database, and we are now beginning to update pages on this site with the aggregate results. We often have about 10 times the patients with particular diagnoses reported by others in the literature.
Visual vertigo is a condition where patients are intolerant of situations where there are large amounts of visual stimulation -- examples include walking through the aisles of a grocery store, difficulties with viewing scrolling computer screens, and driving problems where the speed gets above a certain threshold (often superhighway). It is sometimes diagnosed as a migraine variant (e.g. vestibular migraine), as a psychiatric condition (e.g. PPPD), as an ocular disturbance (e.g. in patients with 3rd nerve palsies or otolithic problems), and as a reorganization to loss of vestibular sensation (e.g. visual dependence). Generally speaking, the overlap is with other symptom inventories invented by various committees.
Some progress has been made in treating this condition by the optometry profession, through manipulation of eye-wear and visual exercises. We have recruited an OD to treat this condition, Dr. Marsha Sorenson. This is going well.
We are also expanding our visual vertigo treatment to include a specific regimen for PPPD (persist ant postural perceptive dizziness). The core methodology will be as suggested -- an SNRI/SSRI and habituation for visual symptoms.