Do you often find yourself struggling to complete tasks in fast paced and busy environments? Does this image look familiar or bothersome to you? Bright lights, loud noises, quick movement, and crowded places can cause discomfort to some individuals. For some, this discomfort could be dizziness, imbalance, vertigo, or other unpleasant sensations. While not everyone experiences the same sensations, the grouping of similar sensations with these visual stimuli could be a vestibular disorder. The vestibular system helps to control your balance and one of the main components of your balance is your vision. When the environmental factors overwhelm your vision, it can interfere with your balance system and bring on symptoms. This category of disorders goes by different names such as visually induced vertigo (VID), vestibular mismatch, or visual vertigo (Van Ombergen et al., 2017). For this blog, we will refer to this disorder as visual vertigo.
Visual Vertigo is a group of symptoms that are associated with the vestibular system. When there is a disruption to the vestibular system this can cause many different issues including, but not limited to: dizziness, imbalance, incoordination, emotional distress, and nausea etc. Individual symptoms and severity of each vary between individuals, but the thing they all have in common is visual triggers. These visual triggers can be bright lights in a store, crowded streets, complex patterns on floors or walls.
Triggers can have a dramatic impact on your life. The urge to avoid these triggers can be overpowering and cause you to avoid different activities. Depending on the severity this can cause you to avoid certain environments entirely. This cascade could make picking up groceries, going to work, or attending social gatherings nearly impossible, which causes a considerable downturn in the quality of your life.
Treatment for visual vertigo is provided by your local Physical Therapist. This is done through vestibular rehabilitation. While this might sound intimidating, it essentially boils down to balance training and sensory reweighting. Balance training helps to reduce your sway in standing and prevent a loss of balance when moving. Sensory reweighting teaches your body to rely on the other components of you balance system because in visual vertigo your body has become too dependent on visual information. The overstimulation of the visual component can interfere with your body’s ability to regulate its balance. For this portion, we focus on helping your body utilize other components of the balance system and help your eyes tolerate more complex visual environments.
Written by: Jacob Urich, PTA, Student PT, Youngstown State University
References:
Van Ombergen, A., Heine, L., Jillings, S., Roberts, R. E., Jeurissen, B., Van Rompaey, V., Mucci, V., Vanhecke, S., Sijbers, J., Vanhevel, F., Sunaert, S., Bahri, M. A., Parizel, P. M., Van de Heyning, P. H., Laureys, S., & Wuyts, F. L. (2017). Altered functional brain connectivity in patients with visually induced dizziness. NeuroImage: Clinical, 14, 538–545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2017.02.020