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REVIEW article

Front. Neurol.
Sec. Neuro-Otology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2024.1502093
This article is part of the Research Topic Artificial stimulation of the vestibular labyrinth: galvanic, magnetic, vibration, sound, and prostheses View all 3 articles

Thirty years with cervical vestibular myogenic potentials: a critical review on its origin

Provisionally accepted
Jonas Bruun Kjærsgaard Jonas Bruun Kjærsgaard 1,2*Dan Dupont Hougaard Dan Dupont Hougaard 1,2Herman Kingma Herman Kingma 1,2
  • 1 Department of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery and Audiology, Aalborg University Hospital, Aalborg, Denmark
  • 2 Department of Clinical Medicine, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Myogenic potentials generated by acoustic stimulation of the vestibular system have been reported since 1964. This examination became better known as cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) and gained increasing clinical application since the nineties. Since its discovery, the saccule has been conceived as the most likely vestibular end-organ driving these myogenic potentials of the neck. As findings from both animal-and human studies for a long time uniformly provided evidence supporting this theory, cVEMP assessment has become synonymous with evaluation of saccular and inferior vestibular nerve function. This review of the basic evidence supporting this conclusion, questions if cVEMP may be considered as being predominantly or even exclusively driven by the activation of any single vestibular endorgan. We conclude that the results of this review show that contributions from the crista ampullaris of all three ipsilateral semicircular canals, as well as the ipsilateral utricle cannot be ruled out in clinically conducted cVEMP assessments.

    Keywords: cVEMP, Vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMP), Vestibulocollic reflex, Sacculus, utriculus, specificity, Semicircular Canal (SCC), Afferent fiber

    Received: 26 Sep 2024; Accepted: 17 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kjærsgaard, Hougaard and Kingma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jonas Bruun Kjærsgaard, Department of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery and Audiology, Aalborg University Hospital, Aalborg, Denmark

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