Table 3.

Summary of main findings.

➢The video head impulse test and measures of dynamic visual acuity correlate with imbalance in older adults; tests of the low frequency VOR (i.e., caloric irrigation and rotational chair testing) do not.

➢ Clinical and instrumented balance tests capture age-related changes in balance performance but are limited in their capacity to isolate specific vestibular contributors (canal versus otolith versus central processing, etc.) to balance dysfunction.

➢Postural responses to galvanic vestibular stimulation are attenuated in older adults yet the relevance of this finding to age-related imbalance is unclear.

➢Biased perceptions of subjective postural vertical and subjective visual vertical correlate with imbalance in older adults suggesting that age-related changes in multisensory integration may contribute to age-related imbalance.

➢Increased vestibular noise, quantified by roll tilt vestibular thresholds, is a significant predictor of sub-clinical balance impairment in asymptomatic older adults; this finding suggests that roll tilt vestibular thresholds may reflect a shared source of central vestibular rnoise affecting both the balance and perceptual pathways of older adults.