Anxiety Can Cause Chronic Dizziness

By Rick Nauert PhD

~ 1 min read

Living with chronic dizziness can be a taxing and exasperating endeavor as medical cures are often few and far between. However, discerning the source of the dizziness can give clinicians a ‘heads up’ toward development of abatement strategies.

New research finds that chronic dizziness can stem from many different causes including anxiety disorders, migraine, and traumatic brain injury in the part of the nervous system governing involuntary activities.

The report is published in the February issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

One particular type of chronic dizziness not related to vertigo (a feeling of turning or whirling usually associated with inner ear problems) has long vexed physicians, according to background information in the article.

“Patients with this syndrome have chronic nonspecific dizziness, subjective imbalance and hypersensitivity to motion stimuli, which are exacerbated in complex visual environments (e.g., walking in a busy store, driving in the rain),” the authors write. Some researchers have proposed the term chronic subjective dizziness for this condition.

Jeffrey P. Staab, M.D., M.S., and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, studied 345 men and women age 15 to 89 (average age 43.5) who had dizziness for three months or longer due to unknown causes. From 1998 to 2004, the patients were tracked from their referral to a balance center through multiple specialty examinations until they were given a diagnosis.

“All but six patients were diagnosed as having psychiatric or neurologic conditions, including primary or secondary anxiety disorders, migraine, traumatic brain injury and neurally mediated dysautonomias,” or abnormal functioning of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary actions.

Anxiety disorders were associated with 60 percent of the chronic dizziness cases and central nervous system conditions (including migraine, brain injuries and autonomic nervous system disorders) with 38.6 percent. Six patients (1.7 percent) had irregular heartbeats.

Source:

http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/02/20/anxiety-can-cause-chronic-dizziness/636.html