The evaluation of vestibular compensation by vestibular rehabilitation and prehabilitation in short-term postsurgical period in patients following surgical treatment of vestibular schwannoma

Purpose Vestibular schwannoma removal causes unilateral vestibular deafferentation, which results in dizziness and postural unsteadiness. Vertigo and balance problems together are among the most important aspects affecting quality of life. Intensive vestibular rehabilitation, which starts before surgery, with following postsurgical supervised rehabilitation, using visual biofeedback propose an instrument to accelerate a recovery process. Another option how to accelerate the vestibular compensation, is employment of presurgical gentamicin ablation together with vestibular rehabilitation (prehabilitation) of vestibular function. Purpose of present study was to examine the dynamics of vestibular compensation process using supervised intensive vestibular rehabilitation with visual biofeedback in the short-term postsurgical period. The second aim was to compare both studied groups mainly to evaluate if prehabilitation has potential to accelerate the compensation process in the early postoperative course. Methods The study included 52 patients who underwent the retrosigmoid vestibular schwannoma removal. They were divided into two groups. The first group was prehabilitated with intratympanic application of gentamicin before surgery to cause unilateral vestibular loss (14 patients), the second group (38 patients) was treated in standard protocol without prehabilitation. All patients underwent at home vestibular training before surgery to learn new movement patterns. Following the surgery supervised intensive vestibular rehabilitation including visual biofeedback was employed daily in both groups between the 5th and 14th postoperative day. Outcome measurements included an evaluation of subjective visual vertical (SVV), posturography and the Activities—Specific Balance Confidence Scale (ABC). ANOVA for repeated measurements was used for statistical analysis. Results We observed significant improvement in SVV ( p