What to do when you get vertigo and recruitment

Contracting vertigo and recruitment can be hard on the sense, and not to mention downright debilitating. Learn what they are and how to cope.

• Any condition affecting the balance centres in either the ear or the brain may cause vertigo, an unpleasant form of dizziness that makes you feel as if either you or your environment is moving, even when you are still.
• Those affected can also feel light-headed and unstable. Like seasickness, vertigo may produce nausea and vomiting.
• It is estimated that about one in 20 of us has suffered from vertigo or other types of dizziness at some time in our lives, with the figures leaping to one in three people aged over 60 and two in three of those over 80.
• Vertigo is normally an inner-ear disorder. It can be caused by a viral infection, a head injury or the side effects of some medications.
• It can also occur in cardiovascular, neurological or other disorders. Always report any dizziness to your doctor in case your medication needs to be reviewed or other causes need to be investigated.

• The main feature of "recruitment" is that sounds get too loud too quickly. Recruitment is always a symptom of hearing loss where some of the hair cells in the cochlea have died off.
• To compensate for the loss of signals at certain frequencies, the brain tries to recruit adjacent cells to do the job.
• These cells then send a double signal, both for their own and the missing frequency, making certain sounds seem twice as loud as normal. If the loss of hair cells is severe, the recruited cells may even operate for many missing ones at once — making the perceived sound louder still.
• You may not be able to hear a sound at all until the recruited cells start working, at which point the volume is multiplied so that the noise is unbearably loud.
• In such cases, a person suffering from the condition might ask someone to speak up, and then protest, "No need to shout. I'm not deaf!"
• Since cells detecting different frequencies are signalling at the same time, the extra-loud sounds are also fuzzy, so people affected may find it hard to distinguish similar-sounding words, or they may even experience all speech as meaningless noise.