Cervical Vestibular-Evoked Myogenic Potentials in Individuals with Diabetes Mellitus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) in individuals with diabetes mellitus (DM) provide evidence as how diabetes can bring about changes in the peripheral nervous system. Cervical VEMP (cVEMP) evaluates the function and integrity of the sacullo- collic pathway and ocular VEMP (oVEMP) evaluates the utriculo-collic pathway. cVEMP is an ipsilateral inhibitory response of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. cVEMP is recorded at higher intensity above 80-85 dBnHL with biphasic waveforms having initial peak positivity P13 followed by a negativity N23. We performed a systematic review following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to evaluate cVEMP in diabetes mellitus. The search was conducted in the databases: PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Scopus, and Cochrane library using the keywords “diabetes mellitus” and “vestibular evoked myogenic potential” or “cVEMP.” A two-phase selection process was used for the final inclusion of studies, and the methodological quality of these studies was assessed using the Newcastle Ottawa scale (NCOS). Meta-analysis was performed using a random-effects model. For comparisons between DM and healthy controls, a significant difference was observed for cVEMP amplitude (P = 0.01). Our meta-analysis’s results suggest peripheral vestibular dysfunction can be observed in DM. It appears that cVEMPs may be useful in the early detection of neuropathy in DM.