You’re standing still, but you feel like you’re spinning. You’re dizzy and nauseous, and your vision is blurry. If this sounds like you, you might have vertigo.
“Vertigo is imbalance that occurs when the brain receives positioning information from different sensors – your eyes and inner ear, for example – which doesn’t match up,” says D. Curtis Coonce, MD, FACS, otolaryngologist at Saint Francis Medical Center. “Although blows to the head, migraines and brain tumors can cause vertigo, the most common cause is an inner ear disorder.”
To determine whether an inner ear disorder is causing your vertigo, Coonce recommends the state-of-the-art videonystagmography (VNG) test. The test uses small cameras to measure involuntary eye movements in response to different head positions. In addition to identifying the cause of your vertigo, it can also differentiate between a disorder in one ear or both ears.
For more information, visit
www.sfmc.net/dev-2015 or call 573-331-3000.