Is head-shaking nystagmus a sign of vestibular dysfunction?
Hall SF; Laird ME Department of Otolaryngology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It has been proposed that head-shaking nystagmus is a reliable test or indicator of vestibular dysfunction. Using a series of 340 patients and 20 controls, this paper compares the vestibular test data to head-shake test data to answer some of the questions about this poorly understood response. Head-shaking nystagmus appears to reflect the underlying spontaneous nystagmus and its direction has no relationship to the side of the vestibular asymmetry.
