Table of Contents

ABSTRACT

Cervical vestibular-evoked myogenic potential (cVEMP) is an electrophysiological test that is able to measure the status of saccule and inferior vestibular nerve objectively. In order to produce robust cVEMP waveforms, 500 Hz tone burst has been the recommended stimulus. Over the years, there has been a growing interest to study cVEMP when recorded with chirp stimuli. Nevertheless, contradictory results have been reported in the literature in which more research is needed to verify the usefulness of the chirp stimuli in recording cVEMP. Thus, the present study was carried out to compare cVEMP results when tested with wide-band chirp and 500 Hz tone burst stimuli. Twenty healthy young adults (aged 20-24 years) were enrolled in this comparative study. The cVEMP testing was carried out according to the recommended protocol. The stimuli were 500 Hz tone burst (6 ms duration) and custom-built wide-band chirp stimulus (100-10,000 Hz, 10 ms duration). The stimuli were presented through insert earphones at an intensity level of 95 dB nHL with a 5.1/s repetition rate. Relative to the tone burst stimulus, P1 and N1 latencies were significantly longer for the wide-band chirp stimulus (p < 0.001). The wide-band chirp stimulus also produced statistically smaller P1-N1 amplitudes compared to the tone burst stimulus (p < 0.001). To conclude, the 500 Hz tone is still the preferred stimulus for recording cVEMP and should be used without a doubt in clinical settings. Keywords: Dizziness, vestibular-evoked myogenic potential, saccule, chirp, latency, amplitude