A little dose of vertigo

Just when I thought I was over my horrible cold/flu, it returns with a vengeance, this time wreaking havoc on my inner ear and making me feel like Lucille Austero.



Okay, it's not that bad. I'm not actually falling over like Lucille 2; I just have a case of the dizzies, as she might say. What a great opportunity to revel in my science nerd-dom with a mini-lecture on the vestibular system!

Much of our sense of balance and our sense of the position of our body in space comes from our inner ear. The inner ear contains the three semicircular canals, each located in its own plane.

NIH Medical Arts

  Each semicircular canal has a bulge of tissue at its base which houses the cupula. Inside the cupula are hair cells that bend and sway based on the movement of fluid through the semicircular canals. Their movement sends a signal to a sensory nerve, and this information goes to the brain.

The canals are responsible for transducing rotational movement like shaking your head from side to side or nodding. But the inner ear also contains the otolith organs (the utricle and saccule), which transduce linear movement, like when you are walking.

Infection or inflammation of any of these structures in the inner ear or of the nerve leading away from the inner ear can cause the nerve cell to send an improper signal to the brain, one that doesn't jive with visual and other sensory information coming in. The result? Dizziness and vertigo. This kind of vertigo is common in the flu and upper respiratory infections, but there are other non-viral causes as well, some of which can cause more severe and longer-lasting vertigo. Poor Lucille.