An Epidemiological Study of the Predisposing Factors of Meniere's Disease using by the Community Psychological Technique

Abstract

To clarify the relationships between the stress and the vertiginous attack, changes events, which 17 patients with Meniere's disease met in their community life during recent three months, were checked out by the Environmental Change Event Inventory (including 139 items) reported by Kobayashi (1977). When they checked out, they rated the degree of subjective shock by five point scale, for defining subjective weight of stressful impact in each change event. Moreover, the weight of objective stressful impact in each change event was used which was reported under the data of 1067 respondents by Yamamoto (1972). The total number of subjectively and objectively weighted change events was computed as social stressors with the subjects which was exposed in their community life.This study revealed the following features.(1) The score of social stressors of 11 patients with Meniere's disease which were suffering from vertiginous attacks was higher than that of 6 patients with no attack.(2) The score of social stressors of patients with many attacks was high.These data suggested quantitatively that social stress might induced the vertiginous attacks with Meniere's disease.