Stance performance under different sensorimotor conditions in patients with post-traumatic otolith disorders

Dynamic posturography with the Equitest system is helpful to screen patients for balance deficits, but diagnostic specificity, for otolith disorders is unknown until now. It was therefore the aim of our present paper to examine patients with a well-defined otolith disorder on the Equitest at different test conditions while simultaneously recording trunk sway by means of the Sway Star system. A total of 22 patients with different types of otolith disorders were included in this study. All test results of the patients were matched with respect to age and gender to controls without history of ENT diseases. The overall sensitivity of the Equitest system in our series was only higher than 50% in 2 conditions. The results of the trunk sway recordings were significantly different between patients with a sacculo-utricular disorder and controls in all test conditions. The results suggest that a disorder of the otolith organs seems to affect especially the trunk sway to a large extent.