Abstract
Introduction: From fiscal year 2011, the Japan Society for Equilibrium Research started a certification system for doctors consulting regarding dizziness, and it is predicted that an increasing number of clinic doctors will be certified as consulting doctors for this purpose in the future. Further, the importance of clinic doctors involved in primary care as consulting doctors for dizziness is anticipated to increase. We investigated vertiginous outpatients who visited our ENT clinic.
Subjects: For the 4 years from January 2010 to December 2013, 810 out of 16,903 patients (4.8%) who visited our clinic complained of dizziness.
Results: The patients consisted of 239 males and 571 females aged 6-97 years, with a male-to-female ratio of 1: 2.4. Among the 810 patients who visited our clinic with a complaint of dizziness, the presence of nystagmus was examined using an infrared CCD camera in 366 patients (45%), and these patients were diagnosed as having the following conditions: the most common vertiginous disease was benign paroxysmal positional vertigo in 208 (25.7%), followed by other peripheral vestibular disorders in 66 (8.1%) and Meniere's disease in 57 (7.0%). Many of the patients with nystagmus visited our clinic early after the onset of dizziness, and 75.4% of the patients with dizziness visited within seven days after onset.
