Walking down locker-lined school corridors or cruising grocery-store aisles and looking side to side for the products she needs can make Paula Calabrese dizzy and "burpy." So do quick movements like jumping out of bed when the alarm sounds.
But the Oakmont, Pa., woman never really connected the symptoms -- in fact, she didn't even think of them as symptoms -- until she mentioned the incidents to her primary-care physician during her most recent annual physical.
"She suggested I come to (the University of Pittsburgh's) Eye and Ear (Institute) and visit the (Center for Balance Disorders)," said Calabrese, 67, an educational consultant now working with a leadership initiative at the Woodland Hills School District.
At the balance center she was examined by center director Dr. Joseph Furman, who gave her various tests and then, after reviewing the results, told her something was wrong.
"I said maybe it had something to do with aging," Calabrese said, laughing. "He said it had nothing to do with aging."
Rather, Furman told her, there appeared to be two problems.
One had to do with the otoconia, crystals on the tiny hairs in the inner ears that help respond to gravity. Those otoconia can get displaced, causing a sensation of spinning.
The other problem appeared to be visual in nature. Movement in Calabrese's peripheral field of view may have contributed to imbalance.
Furman first suggested medication, but Calabrese didn't like that option.
As a second option, he suggested physical therapy for balance disorders. She decided to enter an ongoing National Institutes of Health-funded trial at the University of Pittsburgh. Called the Virtual Reality Treatment for Balance Disorders Study, it has a control group of patients taking conventional physical therapy for imbalance and another group of patients undergoing treatment in a sort of life-size video game.
All the participants go through a series of balance and mobility tests and fill out surveys on dizziness-producing activities before and after their participation.
Calabrese landed in the virtual-reality part of the study, which was designed by a group of researchers led by Dr. Sue Whitney, principal investigator on the grant. The group also includes Dr. Pat Sparto, director of the Medical Virtual Reality Center and a physical therapist with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering; and Furman.
The game, constructed from the software of Unreal Tournament with artwork by students from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, projects three-dimensional, moving images of a grocery store onto three screens that surround a typical grocery cart fastened to a treadmill. The goal is to find a new way to treat dizziness and imbalance.
The patient "shopper," hooked to a safety harness, can push the cart at whatever speed he or she wants up to about 3 mph while traveling up and down 16 aisles of increasing difficulty. Easier aisles are stocked with larger products like big boxes of cereals, while the harder ones are home to smaller products like soup and vegetable cans.
While moving through the aisles, the patient is directed by Whitney, who holds a Ph.D. in education, a physical therapist and a researcher at the Medical Virtual Reality Center. The patient must point out various products located on shelves to either the left or right and anywhere from the top shelf to the bottom.
"What we have noticed here is optic flow (movement of the visual field); that it's all this stuff that moves past you that's very disorienting," Whitney said, with Calabrese nodding in agreement. "We think that's what is (causing the balance problems), and that's part of what we're trying to learn. We ask Paula and others what bothers them in this store, and we're trying to get some sense of what it is so we can ... better simulate it here and gradually get them used to handling it."
(Pohla Smith can be reached at psmith(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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This is an interesting read.
This is an interesting read. I wonder if this balance disorder is similar to motion sickness. It would be great to see if this disorder can be fixed somehow. I am sure many people out there have similar disorders such as this but fail to speak up about it. I don't get motion sickness or have any trouble balancing myself, but perhaps it is due to playing 1st person shooter games on the computer growing up. Perhaps I have developed some sort of ability to resist feeling so dizzy. I do know many people who do get motion sickness and often dizzy that doesn’t play any sort of video games. more info
Potomac Fever Blossoming
Potomac Fever is spreading faster than Gorbachev on a jet plane from Moscow. It appears the Potomac Fever has affected Obama and his administration. The first signs of Potomac Fever is when the person feels a new and growing sense of power. Many newcomers in the three branches of government have no knowledge of how to resist the Potomac Fever. Even the Capitol Hill Pages are liable to become infected and the likelihood of spreading the effects when returning to their high schools in rural America makes their unwitting peers highly susceptible. The Potomac Fever actually spreads at the beginning of the Spring Cherry Blossom's Festival in Washington, D.C.
The Potomac fever is so rampant that by the time the blossoms fall, all the promises during spring break back home in rural America by elected Congressional Reps and Senators are obliterated by their overwhelming sense of power. The cure for Potomac Fever is term limits mandated by the voters. All branches of government should be held to the same standard. Seniority is a side effect, which makes recovering from Potomac Fever by the elected officials all the more difficult to treat. The cure is to cut their allowances.
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