On the Effectiveness of airborne infrasound in eliciting vestibular-evoked myogenic responses

The use of airborne infrasound and other stimuli to elicit (cervical) vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) was studied to address the common proposition that infrasound may efficiently stimulate the vestibular system, an effect which may underlie the so-called wind-turbine syndrome. cVEMPs were measured for both ears of 15 normal-hearing subjects using three types of airborne sound stimulation: (1) 500-Hz tone bursts (transient); (2) 500-Hz sinusoidally amplitude-modulated tones at a 40-Hz rate (SAM); and (3) low-frequency and infrasound pure tones (LF/IS). The two former stimulation types served as control and allowed a systematic comparison with (3). It was found that SAM stimulation is effective and appears to be comparable to transient stimulation, as was previously observed in a yet small number of studies. Although the vestibular system is reported to be highly sensitive to low-frequency mechanical vibration, airborne LF/IS stimulation at ∼80–90-phon loudness levels did not elicit significant saccular vestibular responses.