People with persistent postural-perceptual dizziness demonstrate altered postural strategies in complex visual and cognitive environments.

BACKGROUND

People with PPPD report imbalance, increase in symptoms and impaired function within complex visual environments, but understanding of the mechanism for these behaviors is still lacking.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate postural control in PPPD we compared changes in center of pressure (COP) and head kinematics of people with PPPD (N = 22) and healthy controls (N = 20) in response to different combinations of visual and cognitive perturbations during a challenging balance task.

METHODS

Participants stood in a tandem position. Static or moving stars (0.2 Hz, 5 mm or 32 mm amplitude, anterior-posterior direction) were displayed through a head-mounted display (HTC Vive). On half the trials, participants performed a serial-3 subtraction task. We measured medio-lateral and anterior-posterior path and acceleration of COP and head.

RESULTS

Controls significantly increased all COP and head parameters with the cognitive task whereas PPPD increased only COP ML path and acceleration. Only controls significantly increased head anterior-posterior & medio-lateral acceleration with moving visual load. Cognitive task performance was similar between groups.

CONCLUSIONS

We observed altered postural strategies in people with PPPD, in the form of reduced movement with challenge, particularly around the head segment. The potential of this simple and portable head-mounted display setup for differential diagnosis of vestibular disorders should be further explored.