What is the difference between vestibular migraine and vestibular disorders?

Vestibular migraines 🤯 are one of the most mismanaged conditions leaving sufferers confused and frustrated.

Feeling Dizzy - Did they get the diagnosis right?

Dizziness is a common complaint but one that is often misdiagnosed and therefore mismanaged.  Most dizziness symptoms either come from vestibular migraine or a vestibular disorder.  

Here we will help to differentiate the two, so you can find out which one you have.

Vestibular migraines and Vestibular disorders can both lead to dizziness, nausea, and they can make it feel like everything is spinning.

These two disorders have many overlapping symptoms, and because of this, these conditions are often confused and leave everyone feeling frustrated at the lack of improvement from treatment. 

So what are vestibular migraines and how do they differ from vestibular disorders? And most importantly how do we help it? 

To distinguish between the two it's useful to cover some anatomy.  Your nervous system is split into 2 sections, the central and peripheral nervous systems. 

Your central nervous system is your brain and spine. While your peripheral nervous system is all the nerves that spread out from your brain or spinal cord.  

Vestibular disorders are a group of conditions that affect your peripheral nervous systems, that is the nerve after they branch off from your brain and spinal cord such as your vestibulocochlear nerve, which is the nerve responsible for hearing and balance that is located in your inner ear.  

2 common examples of vestibular disorders are bppv and meniere’s disease.

In bppv there is a disruption in the canals in the inner ear that are sensitive to your head position and gravity. When there is a disruption in those canals, it can lead to a spinning sensation and nausea, which most commonly occurs when you change the position of your head, such as when rolling in bed or quickly turning your head. 

Meniere's disease occurs when there is a buildup of fluid in the canals in your inner ear. Symptoms usually occur in 1 ear, however it is not too uncommon for it to be in both ears. It starts with a sensation of fullness in the ear and hearing loss and tinnitus. An attack or episode usually involves a sense of the room spinning, nausea and loss of balance. This can last up to 4 hours in a bad case, after this most people feel brain fog and exhaustion.

In contrast Vestibular migraines are caused by conditions affecting your brain or spinal cord, most commonly a sensitisation of your brainstem, which sits at the base of your brain. When it is sensitised, it muddles or blurs the normal signals from your peripheral nerves before they reach the brain, causing a miscommunication between the systems. 

Vestibular disorders are due to a disruption of the nerve signals outside of your spine or brain such as in your inner ear, whereas vestibular migraines are caused by a disruption of the nerve signals once they reach your spinal or brain.  It is not uncommon to have elements of both contributing to your dizziness and migraines.

So what can be done to treat it? 

First and foremost it is important to get a good diagnosis so you know the exact cause of your dizziness, as there are a lot of overlapping symptoms, as different dizziness conditions need to be treated differently and need different exercises.  

Treatment involves a combination of hands on manual therapy, to treat your neck and decrease the sensitization of your brainstem.  

As well as specific exercises are needed to retrain the affected part of your vestibular system to recalibrate your ears, eyes, brain and neck so that can work in synchronisation again and reduce your symptoms of dizziness, off-balance, nausea, head pain, fatigue, light/sound/smell sensitivity.

Because of this, it is important to get treated from someone with advanced training in the field of dizziness, headaches and migraines so that an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan can be provided.  

 

If you are experiencing dizziness and want to know more about your condition and get on a better pathway to recovery, come visit one of our practitioners today.

If you have any questions or queries, reach out to us. I hope you have found this helpful and if you have, please share it around as dizziness is not well understood and yet so common in society so we need to help as many people as possible understand it and get help. 

Thank you and if you need anything, let us know.