A Review of the Association Between the Vestibular (Balance) System and Neurological and Psychiatric Conditions.

Many people in our community suffer from severe mental illness and neurological disorders. The personal suffering is great, and there is a huge cost in terms of the burden of care on families plus the overall loss of the individual’s contribution to society. The costbenefits of early diagnosis and intervention are well established at an economic, societal and individual level but hampering early intervention is the current lack of definitive, quantitative techniques for diagnosing or measuring many of the biological, brain changes in mental illnesses. Neither are there any objective, quantitative techniques to measure the efficacy of drugs applied to the majority of these conditions. We are working towards developing a new biomarker technique that can quantify biological change in mental illness by measuring signals from well established bi-direction neural pathways between emotional centres of the brain and the vestibular (balance) system.
The purpose of this literature review is to provide a background to our new technique,
Electrovestibulography, which measures signals from the vestibular system. Studies identifying links between the vestibular system and emotion processing systems supports our research aims, which are to explore biomarkers derived from the vestibular system that can help differentiate and monitor different neuropsychiatric disorders.
Recent literature has examined the close links between the vestibular system and emotion processing systems, with some researchers suggesting a causal relationship. In particular, the co-occurrence of dizziness and anxiety has been well documented. Studies exploring the neurological bases of the links between the vestibular and emotion processing systems have confirmed that there a number of bi-direction neural pathways that connect brain regions involved in emotional processing, to the vestibular system. Certain neurotransmitter (brain chemicals) pathways, which are clearly involved in