ER visits for dizziness cost over $4 billion a year

It's enough to make your head spin. Estimated costs for visits to hospital emergency departments for dizziness-related complaints exceed $4 billion a year, according to a new study.

Dizziness and vertigo are the chief symptoms presented by 3.9 million—or about 4%—of all emergency department patients, Johns Hopkins University researchers report in the Academic Emergency Medicine journal. The average ED dizziness visit cost $1,004 in 2011 dollars.

On another dizziness-related issue, Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. David Newman-Toker tested a “video-oculography” machine that detects eye movements that can indicate a stroke. With confirmation from an MRI, the device accurately diagnosed the six patients who had strokes among the 12 who presented with dizziness and vertigo, according to his study posted on the website for the journal Stroke.

“Using this device can directly predict who has had a stroke and who has not,” Newman-Toker, an associate professor of neurology and otolaryngology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said in a news release. “We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on expensive stroke work-ups that are unnecessary, and probably missing the chance to save tens of thousands of lives because we aren't properly diagnosing their dizziness or vertigo as stroke symptoms."

Follow Andis Robeznieks on Twitter: @MHARobeznieks