Out of the blue, you begin to feel dizzy… the room begins to spin.
You sit or lie down.
Minutes or hours pass.
You are okay again.
The big question remains: what triggered your vertigo?
More importantly… how can you prevent it?
A new study published in the Journal of Audiology & Otology pinpoints five triggers of vertigo. And most of them are easy to tackle.
Korean researchers used data from 1,274 adults collected by the 2010 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
This included information on dizziness, nutritional intake, health status, and quality of life, paired with everything they could learn from the participants’ blood and urine tests.
It was clear that vertigo significantly decreased one’s quality of life:
1) People with vertigo were more likely than their peers to complain of impairments in mobility, self-care, the performance of everyday tasks, and either anxiety or depression.
2) They had a longer history of falls, which is unsurprising.
3) They were more likely than their peers to report limiting their daily activities, which is understandable because these activities are harder to accomplish.
4) Accordingly, the vertigo sufferers reported a poorer quality of life than their peers, which is precisely the aspect of vertigo that makes it so difficult to live with.
The good news is that researchers could pinpoint several factors that contribute to vertigo. Most of them were things that could be fixed.
Here are the five triggers:
1) Women and elderly people were significantly more likely to suffer from vertigo than men and younger individuals.
2) People with vertigo were more likely to have consumed lower levels of Vitamin B2, Vitamin A, and carotene (a building block for vitamin A).
3) People with higher hemoglobin levels, which is often caused by smoking, drugs, dehydration, lung disease, heart disease, or cancer, were more likely to have vertigo. Hemoglobin is a protein in your red blood cells that carries oxygen.
4) People with higher amounts of fats in their blood streams were the most likely to have vertigo.
5) People with high creatinine levels, often due to kidney disease, were more likely to have vertigo. Creatinine is a waste product from the normal breakdown of muscle cells that your kidneys are meant to remove from your body.
High blood pressure and chronic middle ear infection were also risk factors.
What is clear from this list is that the main underlying cause of vertigo would be the lack of blood flow through the arteries, particularly with arteries that lead to the head.