抄録
Nowadays the diagnosis of MÉNIÈRE's disease usually is made on the basis of the presence of such subjective symptoms as vertigo, tinnitus and hearing impairment. However, experience in routine practice clearly indicates how unreliable and uncertain patients are in their awareness of the symptoms they have. A total of 10 cases presented by MÉNIÈRE in his treatises published in 1861 were invariably of an idiopathic inner ear disorder, presently designated as MÉNIÈRE's disease or sudden deafness. MÉNIERÈ's true intention in publishing his famous four articles was to contend that there exists an idiopathic disease characterized by attacks of symptoms of inner ear origin. MÉNIÈRE himself never discriminated the presently well-established triad (i. e. vertigo, tinnitus and hearing impairment) from other accompanying manifestation, such as vomiting, facial pallor and syncope. Therefore, there would be no necessity of considering vertigo, tinnitus and hearing loss as essential to the diagnosis of MÉNIÈRE's disease, nor any reason to rely solely on the patient's subjective symptomatology in making a diagnosis of the disease. Recent progress in otoneurology has provided us otologists with far more reliable objective means of demonstrating inner ear disorder (such as tests for equilibrium function and audiometry) than patients' subjective complaints. Based on the MÉNIÈRE's articles and my personal experiences, I tentatively defined MÉNIÈRE's disease as an inner ear disorder of nonextrinsic origin characterized by more or less clearly definable, alternating periods of attack and attack-free intermission. I reviewed 50 of my cases in an endeavor to examine the legitimacy of this definition.
