BME Seminar Series: Dr. Dan Merfeld, OSU College of Medicine

Research Professor, Department of Otolaryngology, College of Medicine, The Ohio State Univeristy

All dates for this event occur in the past.

245 Bevis Hall
245 Bevis Hall
1080 Carmack Rd.
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract:

"Probing the Links Among Aging, Vestibular Function, Balance, and Falls"

Our vestibular system – our equilibrium organs found in our inner ear – sense head motion and orientation. Via patient studies, vestibular dysfunction has long been known to contribute to imbalance (and other symptoms like dizziness). In this talk, I draw links between vestibular function, balance, and falls with a long-term goal to create screening tests of vestibular function and balance that could help reduce falls. I will present both published and unpublished data. In one recently published study, we quantified the extent to which vestibular thresholds increase with age and then showed that vestibular thresholds were correlated with balance test findings. In a follow-up analyses of the same data set (just published), we performed a comprehensive multi-variate analysis of the link between vestibular thresholds and balance. Given these published findings, we now evaluate possible causality of vestibular function on imbalance using standard statistical mediation analyses. Specifically, it has long been known that imbalance in adults increases with age. While age-effects on balance are known to be multi-factorial including potential mediators like kinesthesia, motor control, muscle function, and/or vestibular function, we have yet to find a study that reports statistically significant mediation analyses to help evaluate whether any (or all) of the above causal factors mediate the observed age-effect. In this presentation, we present our previously published findings showing a substantive and significant correlation between increasing age and increasing vestibular thresholds (Bermúdez Rey et al., 2016). We also present findings that show the correlation of increasing age alone with imbalance, the effect of increasing vestibular thresholds alone on balance, and the combined effect of vestibular thresholds and age on balance (Karmali et al., 2017). Finally, we present mediation analyses to begin to evaluate whether vestibular function might be a causative mediator of imbalance in normal asymptomatic humans.

Bio: Dr. Merfeld received his B.S.M.E. (1982) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his M.S.E. (1985) in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. (1990) in Biomedical Engineering from MIT. Dr. Merfeld is a Professor at the Ohio State University in the department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Cancer, where he also serves as the Research Vice-Chair. He has courtesy appointments at OSU in Biomedical Engineering and Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. Dr. Merfeld also serves as the Senior Vestibular Scientist at the Naval Medical Research Unit – Dayton (NAMRUD). Dr. Merfeld is a neuroengineer/neuroscientist and an inventor of the vestibular implant – the vestibular equivalent of a cochlear implant. His primary research studies the processing of motion cues and sensorimotor integration through the use of physiological and psychophysical measures as well as computational neuroscience techniques such as dynamic systems modeling. Dr. Merfeld conducts such neuro-vestibular investigations in an attempt to (a) prevent falls and other spatial disorientation accidents, (b) better understand how the nervous system processes noisy ambiguous sensory cues and (c) develop new tools to help diagnose clinical disorders.

 

More info to come!