NEW ORLEANS – Vestibular and oculomotor impairment is increasingly recognized as a common, underappreciated, and yet treatable aspect of sports concussions, Gary W. Dorshimer, MD, said at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians.
Bruce Jancin/MDedge News
Dr. Gary W. Dorshimer
A major advance in the diagnosis and treatment of this form of impairment has been achieved by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center sports medicine concussion program.
“The Pitt group has come up with a nice exam to assess this part of the concussion injury, which doesn’t affect your memory, it doesn’t affect your cognition, it affects what I’ve found to be the thing that takes the longest to get better: the oculomotor/vestibular mechanism,” explained Dr. Dorshimer, chief of general internal medicine at Penn Medicine, Philadelphia, and team physician for the Philadelphia Flyers professional ice hockey team.
The exam, which the Pitt group has described in full detail (Am J Sports Med. 2014;42(10):2479-86), is known as the Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening assessment, or VOMS. The tool has filled an unmet need in sports medicine, he said. It takes only a few minutes for a physician to perform. The rating scale assesses visual motion sensitivity, smooth eye pursuits, horizontal and vertical saccades, the vestibular ocular reflex, and convergence. Positive findings warrant specialized referral for targeted rehabilitation using visual-ocular and vestibular therapies.
The symptoms of sports concussion–related oculomotor/vestibular impairment may include nausea, vertigo, dizziness, blurred or double vision, difficulty tracking a moving target, and discomfort in busy environments. These symptoms often translate to difficulty reading and academic problems, which historically often were misinterpreted as cognitive impairments.
It’s estimated that oculomotor/vestibular impairment occurs in roughly 60% of sports concussions. These vestibular and/or vision symptoms are associated with protracted recovery. And preliminary evidence demonstrates that targeted physical therapies are effective in speeding recovery.
“It’s so important to be able to find this [impairment] because it’s something you can do something about. We find that when these things are off and people work on them, they get better. That’s why so many people in the field are now saying that if a patient works hard, does the rehabilitation, the majority of them are going to get better. And they won’t get better unless they press forward,” the internist said.
The VOMS screen is simple to perform. It entails tasks such as convergence testing, in which the physician moves a finger or pen steadily closer to the patient’s face; if the patient reports that the single object has turned into two at a distance of more than 6 cm, that’s a positive result indicative of convergence insufficiency.