TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Otolith Function Tests A1 - Halmagyi, G. Michael A1 - Curthoys, Ian S. A2 - Herdman, Susan J. A2 - Clendaniel, Richard A. PY - 2014 T2 - Vestibular Rehabilitation AB - The balance organs in the inner ear—the vestibular sensory regions—are the gyros of the human body, and unnoticed, they function continuously in an almost perfect fashion, providing the brain with information about head position and head movement. Until these organs fail, no one really appreciates their significance in daily life, and anyone who has experienced an attack of vertigo will readily verify their importance. The accelerations involved in movements generate forces, and the biological gyros of the inner ear detect these forces: both the force imposed by gravity and the forces generated when we move. The vestibular sensors are constructed in such away that different regions detect rotational forces and linear forces in any direction. The brain synthesizes the information from these separate force detectors to provide a global integrated summary of where a person is and how the person is moving. This realization is of clinical importance, because it implies that disease affecting only one isolated region of the inner ear has consequences for the overall integration of all the vestibular sensory input. In this chapter, we deal only with the otoliths, the structures that sense linear forces, such as the force of gravity or the “straight line” acceleration experienced in a vehicle accelerating from a stop. SN - PB - F. A. Davis Company CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/03/29 UR - fadavispt.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1135015550 ER -