Effects of age, sex and stimulus parameters upon vestibulo-ocular responses to sinusoidal rotation.

We evaluated the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) in 50 normal human subjects, uniformly distributed in age 20-59 years, and evenly distributed in sex by decade, using sinusoidal rotation over the frequency range of 0.005 to 1.0 Hz and three peak amplitudes of 25, 50, and 100 deg/sec. Age variations. The gain magnitude of the normal human VOR appears to decrease with increasing age. This trend becomes statistically significant at p less than 0.05 for the 0.005 and 0.01 Hz test points. Sex-related variations. There were no statistically significant differences in gain magnitude between the sexes but females had higher average gains than males for the lowest test frequencies. The phase data showed a trend with the average phase points for females being less than those for males. This difference was statistically significant at p less than 0.05 for the 0.005 Hz test frequency. Dynamic range. Increasing the stimulus amplitude by a factor of four yielded a small but statistically significant decrease in gain magnitude, thus suggesting a mild saturation-type of nonlinearity.