Caloric Nystagmic Response of Patients with Ménière's Disease in Long-term Follow-up Observation

It is most difficult to evaluate the prognosis of patients with Meniere's disease. We estimated the relationship between the activity of the disease and the caloric nystagmic response by reviewing long-term follow-up observation on these patients.Sixty-four patients aged 15 to 56 at the onset of the disease were investigated. The items for investigation were frequency of attack, spontaneous or positional nystagmus, caloric nystagmus, postrotatory nystagmus, hearing impairment, blood pressure (including the Schellong's test), treatment received and so on.The following conclusions were obtained.1. Estimation of the prognosis cannot be made at the first examination of the patient.2. The attacks occurred most frequently in the patients who tended to show DP in the caloric nystagmic response, over a long period of time.3. There were some in whom the caloric nystagmic response changed from DP to CP after a short time, or in whom there was no caloric difference between the left and right ears after a short period with caloric DP.