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The development of a new questionnaire for cognitive complaints in vertigo: the Neuropsychological Vertigo Inventory (NVI)

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Abstract

Vertigo patients frequently complain of emotional and associated cognitive problems, yet currently, there is no satisfactory questionnaire to measure these associated problems. In the present paper, we propose a new internet-based Neuropsychological Vertigo Inventory (NVI; French) that evaluates attention, memory, emotion, space perception, time perception, vision, and motor abilities. The questionnaire was created using four steps: (1) open interviews with patients suffering from vertigo; (2) semi-structured interviews with an analysis grid to quantify and define the various cognitive and emotional problems reported by the patients; (3) a first version of an internet questionnaire tested on 108 vertigo participants; and (4) the selection of subscale items using principal component analyses (PCA). From the development phase, the revised NVI was composed of seven subscales, each with four items (28 items). In the validation phase, Cronbach’s alphas were performed on the revised NVI for total and each subscale score, and to test extreme groups validity, the analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) taking into account age were performed between 108 vertigo and 104 non-vertigo participants. The Cronbach’s alphas showed good to satisfactory coefficients for the total and for all subscale scores, demonstrating acceptable reliability. The extreme groups validity analyses (ANCOVAs) were reliable for the total scale and for four subscales. Supplementary analyses showed no effect of hearing difficulties and an inverse age effect for attention and emotion subscales, with reduced problems with increased age in the vertigo participants. The NVI provides a useful new questionnaire to determine cognitive and emotional neuropsychological complaints that are associated with vertigo.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the Saint-Luc hospital Foundation. The authors would like to specially thank Cédric Taverne for his helpful comments regarding the data analyses, the members of the E.N.T department and the Centre d’audiophonologie of Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc for their comments and feedback on the questionnaire development, and for all of the participants of the study.

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Correspondence to Emilie Lacroix.

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This study was funded by the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc Foundation (no grant number).

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards (Clinical-Trial-Number NCT02533739).

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Lacroix, E., Deggouj, N., Salvaggio, S. et al. The development of a new questionnaire for cognitive complaints in vertigo: the Neuropsychological Vertigo Inventory (NVI). Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 273, 4241–4249 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-016-4135-x

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