Clinical and demographic characteristics of children and adolescents with acute vertigo symptoms: A cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND/AIM: Vertigo is one of the rarely diagnosed disorders during childhood due to insufficient description of the children regarding their experiences to the physicians. The clinical features of children and adolescents admitted by acute vertigo symptoms were investigated to elaborate the subject retrospectively. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Between January 2017–July 2019, records of cases admitted with acute vertigo complaints to pediatric neurology were retrospectively examined. RESULTS: Of 761 patients, mean age was 13.8 years, 64% (n = 487) were women, 22.6% (n = 172) of which were children (1–11 years). A total of 37.3% of the cases (n = 284) had unknown etiology of acute vertigo symptoms, 39.6% (n = 301) had acute vertigo, and 23.1% (n = 176) were considered with no organicity problems but a group of the families stopped cooperating to the full extent in the study. Among all the patients, 25.6% (195/761) had paroxymal vertigo, 6.8% (52/761) had migraine-associated vertigo, 4.5% (34/761) had psychogenic vertigo, and 2.6% (20/761) had epileptic vertigo. Epileptic vertigo was significantly higher in younger children (mean age = 10.6, F(3) = 8874, P < .001), and the ratio of its occurence was also higher among children (60%, χ2 (3) = 20.347, P < .001). CONCLUSION: Vertigo complaints are 1.7 times more common among the girls. Epileptic vertigo is significantly higher among the children. Among younger children, it seems important to consider epilepsy when vertigo emerged.