Caloric and galvanic vestibular stimulation for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease: rationale and prospects

[Bolt_Upright]

I've posted about this before healthunlocked.com/cure-par...

My idea is to periodically review and update topics. We have new people joining all the time (so sorry for people joining us).

Anyway, I found a new article on Caloric Vestibular Stimulation AND Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation. This is a treatment, it is fairly durable, and the technology is here. More testing is needed, but the results to date have been impressive.

Here is the article from Doctor David Wilkinson (He was the doctor behind the original study) tandfonline.com/doi/full/10...

In closing, it would be remiss to allow the challenges that lie ahead to overshadow the therapeutic promise brought by vestibular stimulation. The equipment needed to deliver stimulation can, in rudimentary form, be found in most domestic households and applied with relatively little expertise. Yet surely few would link the bewildering sensations brought about by lending thermal or galvanic currents to the ears with their profound clinical potential. The technological innovations reviewed above bring an ease, safety and potency that make this potential realizable within the next few years. A key next step is to demonstrate cost effectiveness, a process that with funding should take no more than 5 years. In the longer-term, the intriguing question arises as to whether vestibular stimulation, be this CVS and/or GVS, can replace as opposed to merely supplement existing drug treatments for features of Parkinson’s disease.

If anybody wants to work with me to figure out how to build one of these doodads please reach out to me. How hard could it be?

[Bolt_Upright]

We could figure out how to do this, right?

Active treatment involved the simultaneous delivery of a time-varying, warm, saw-tooth thermal (37 °C–42 °C) stimulus to one ear and a cold saw-tooth thermal (37 °C–17 °C) stimulus to the other ear for approximately 19-min.

Unlike other caloric stimulators which typically discharge a constant temperature, the device is able to deliver different temperatures overtime, in the present case oscillating gently from ear canal temperature to ~17℃ every 2 mins in one ear (cold currents primarily activate contralateral cortex), and from ear canal temperature to ~42oc every 1 minute in the other (warm currents primarily activate ipsilateral cortex) for a total period of ~20 minutes [26].

The waveform assigned to each ear can be periodically switched to prevent any vestibular-induced hemispheric bias.

The time-varying feature of the waveform is especially important because it is believed to mitigate both semi-circular canal adaptation and the side-effects that accompany the sudden temperature change induced by traditional irrigation methods.

Allied study also indicates that, unlike constant temperature CVS, a time-varying temperature profile can elicit a distinctive entraining effect on the Gosling Pulsatility Index, a measure of cardio-vascular resistance [26].

[Bolt_Upright]

Explains how the device works: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

[Godiv]

Interesting. How does one build something like this? What did they test with? Sorry I’m actually working and just kind of glancing at stuff but this looks interesting.

[Bolt_Upright]

Caloric vestibular stimulation for the management of motor and non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease: healthunlocked.com/cure-par...