A Two-Year Randomized Trial of Interventions to Decrease Stress Hormone Vasopressin Production in Patients with Meniere’s Disease—A Pilot Study

by Tadashi Kitahara, Hidehiko Okamoto, Munehisa Fukushima, Masaharu Sakagami, Taeko Ito, Akinori Yamashita, Ichiro Ota, Toshiaki Yamanaka

Meniere's disease, a common inner ear condition, has an incidence of 15–50 per 100,000. Because mental/physical stress and subsequent increase in the stress hormone vasopressin supposedly trigger Meniere's disease, we set a pilot study to seek new therapeutic interventions, namely management of vasopressin secretion, to treat this disease. We enrolled 297 definite Meniere's patients from 2010 to 2012 in a randomized-controlled and open-label trial, assigning Group-I (control) traditional oral medication, Group-II abundant water intake, Group-III tympanic ventilation tubes and Group-IV sleeping in darkness. Two hundred sixty-three patients completed the planned 2-year-follow-up, which included assessment of vertigo, hearing, plasma vasopressin concentrations and changes in stress/psychological factors. At 2 years, vertigo was completely controlled in 54.3% of patients in Group-I, 81.4% in Group-II, 84.1% in Group-III, and 80.0% in Group-IV (statistically I Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01099046

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