> Health and Disease > Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat > Ménière's syndrome

The young woman who had come to the Ménière’s support group was in desperate need of support. “She sat there and cried and cried,” remembers Don Lynch, the Toronto-based group’s coordinator.

Between sobs, she told other members how she couldn’t even pick up her baby because of Ménière’s disease–a non-fatal but emotionally debilitating ear disorder that causes spells of vertigo, loss of balance, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and, eventually, hearing loss. “She had to sit down and someone had to hand the baby to her, because she was falling around, really falling around,” says Lynch. “She said, ‘I can’t change the baby; I can’t put the baby to bed. I can hold the baby: that’s it.’ ”

Faced with such pain, most people would feel helpless. Not Lynch.

He tells people like the distraught woman, “There’s a life with Ménière’s.” The former high-school teacher, art collector, and holder of five university degrees knows: he’s coped with Ménière’s for 40 of his 60 years.

The Ménière’s Mystery

Ménière’s was first identified in the 1850s, when French doctor Proper Ménière encountered a number of otherwise normal patients who described a strange sequence of events–dizziness, headaches, pressure, and ringing in one ear–ending with them losing their balance, becoming nauseated, and falling down. To their despair, others laughed them off as drunks. Ménière disagreed, concluding that they suffered from an obscure disorder originating in the inner ear.

Even now, Ménière’s remains a mysterious, often misunderstood illness. Scientists have identified its precursor as endolymphatic hydrops, an excess buildup of the fluid (endolymph) in the inner ear that regulates our sense of balance. Yet some people have this buildup without having Ménière’s, clouding the exact nature of the relationship. Nor is it clear what prompts the overproduction of endolymph in the first place. Most theories revolve around a dysfunction of the endolymphatic sac where the fluid is contained. Seemingly, the sac can be damaged by any number of things–exposure to loud noise, a virus, an allergic reaction–which, combined with other factors, brings on Ménière’s.

Lynch has a strong hunch that his case stemmed from a near-deadly bout of whooping cough at just three months old. “Some of the doctors and medical people feel the strain on my ears coughing and whooping as a little baby could’ve done something,” he says.

Sabitri Ghosh lives in Kingston, Ontario, and writes the health column for Kingston Life Magazine.

Source: alive #271, May 2005