Can balance disorders moderate our cognition? Creation and validation of a new questionnaire

Lacroix, Emilie [UCL] Salvaggio, Samuel [UCL] Deggouj, Naima [UCL] Wiener, Valérie [UCL] DEBUE, Michel [UCL] Edwards, Martin [UCL]

Vertigo (a disorder of balance or dizziness) is a symptom of a vestibular disorder that affects up to 36% of the population (Gopinath et al., 2009). Patients with vertigo frequently complain of associated symptoms such as difficulties in attention, memory, space perception or mood. Currently, there is no satisfactory questionnaire to understand why some patients appear to have more symptoms than others. Instead, the majority of the current questionnaires focus on physical repercussions, impact on daily life or the mood disorders of the patient. For example, the DHI questionnaire (Dizziness Handicap Inventory; Jacobson & Newman, 1990) has been used to evaluate the effects of vestibular disorders causing dizziness on physical and life functional scores. In the present study, we created and validated a new internet-based questionnaire. The Neuropsychological Vertigo Inventory (NVI) evaluated seven different components of cognition: attention, memory, emotion, space perception, time perception, vision and motor abilities. Our aim was to investigate links between vertigo, and the physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms. We first tested the NVI on 212 participants (108 vertigo and 104 without), and analysed the validity of the questionnaire with Validation Confirmatory Analyses and Cronbach’s Alpha. These analyses enabled the removal of the less significant items, and confirmed the final structure of the questionnaire (4 questions in each of the 7 categories). In the second phase, we performed exploratory analyses using the original data. This showed that there were no significant differences between the vertigo and non-vertigo participants for space and time perception cognitions. However, there were significant differences for attention, memory, emotion, vision and motor cognitions. Future studies will aim to replicate these findings, but with vestibular ENT examinations to quantify the precise cause of vertigo, and with behavioural tests to understand objective differences in cognition for patients with compared to without vertigo.