PHT Live – Vestibular Neuritis and Meniere’s Disease

4 Comments

1. Madelyn Martin

   July 30, 2014 at 2:46 pm

   I’m 67, female. Finally seeing a functional medical practitioner, who have saved my life. My history include 6 cancers (uterine, melanoma, breast x2, lung and thyroid. Diabetic, peripheral neuropathy, chronic pancreatitis, shingles in ear x 3, celiac disease (just diagnosed, and we believe one of the underlying causes of much of my health issues, low blood pressure, heart attack, afib, pacemaker…..and the must goes on. I suffer from horrible balance issues, vertigo (not long lasting). I’m going to talk to my new FM doc about your article. FASCINATING AND THANK YOU!. Oh….need to let you know that I’m a survivor, very positive attitude and sense of humor. Was supposed to die more than once.

2. Dr. Martin Rutherford, DC, CFMP

   July 30, 2014 at 6:32 pm

   First of all we are very glad that you have persevered through your health tribulations and applaud your proactive stance on taking care of your health with your FM practitioner. Relative to figuring out the cause of your imbalance and vertigo, we would need to do an examination on you to really identify what is going on. But what I will say is that imbalance is very common for neuropathy patients, and this is something we have seen consistent improvements in with our neuropathy patients. Please let us know if you and your FM practitioner have any questions and in any way that we can be of service to both of you.

3. Rachel

   August 2, 2014 at 11:41 am

   I am a 29 year old with vestibular neronitis, which came on after a virus last December. I am doing vestibular physio, retraining my balance. .I have visual disturbances but no hearing issues.

   you mention metabolic issues – in your experience, can a disfunctioning thyoid impact on vestibular neronitis?

   My dizziness is much worse if I am tired – why is that?

4. Dr. Martin Rutherford, DC, CFMP

   August 3, 2014 at 5:44 pm

   Hello and thank you for your question.

   In our experience thyroid disorders can have an impact on vertigo and dizziness. The exact estimates vary, but most authors agree that a significant percentage of hypothyroid patients have a thyroid disorder due to the immune system killing the thyroid gland, and this is often referred to as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It is widely held that once there is one autoimmune process, it is much more probable that a second autoimmune process can occur. A direct relationship of hypothyroidism being associated with vestibular neuritis has not been discussed in the literature to my knowledge. However, there is some very interesting information coming out stating that about half of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis patients have vestibular damage (If you would like more information on this I attached the reference). This is brand new data and very exciting in our opinion.

   Additionally, as we discussed in the video, the key to improving from a vestibular disorder is to have a healthy cerebellum (for all intents and purposes the balance center of the brain). The intent of physiotherapy modalities for vestibular patients is to give activation to the cerebellum. As is discussed in the vestibular texts and literature, many with conditions like vestibular neuritis will improve with time and physiotherapy. Yet a certain percentage will not, and those are typically the cases we see in our clinic.

   There is now a lot of information coming out about how the immune cells (termed antibodies) involved with the thyroid can have cross reactivity to certain molecules in our food as well as all of these having cross reactivity to the cerebellum. Cross reactivity simply means that the immune cells will not only attack the food molecules as an example, but also the cerebellum, as though the cerebellum was a bacteria or a virus. If you would like to read more on this I recommend you google Dr. Hadjivassiliou. He is a neurologist out of the UK who has done the brunt of the work on immune related disorders to the cerebellum and cross reactivity of thyroid antibodies as well as antibodies that our common to our diet.

   So that is the long winded answer as to how vestibular neuritis could be associated with the thyroid. I can only conjecture that dizziness would increase in conjunction with the fatigue as possibly the fatigue and dizziness are secondary to the immune system being flared up to both areas of the body. Please feel free to discuss this information with your doctor. We are always trying to stay on top of the most recent literature for these subjects, and we would be happy to forward any references to you GP, neurologist or ENT. If you have any other questions we could go over them with a consultation.