Motion and space sickness: Intestinal and autonomic correlates

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of autonomic nervous system and gastrointestinal changes that occur during motion sickness. It is important to consider that motion sickness is a syndrome that can vary between individuals and within individuals and between and within motion sickness-inducing stimuli. Vomiting should be considered a discrete event of the motion sickness syndrome. Given so much variability in motion sickness symptoms, it should be expected that the physiological response to motion sickness will vary as well. This appears to be the case with the autonomic nervous system and gastrointestinal changes during motion sickness. Although much research remains to be done, it appears undeniable that the physiological expression of motion sickness is mediated by the autonomic nervous system, and when nausea is a predominant symptom, the stomach in general shuts down in a response characterized by decreased normal gastric myoelectrical activity and delayed gastric emptying.

Section snippets

The motion sickness syndrome

Motion sickness can occur in response to real or apparent motion. When motion sickness occurs in response to real motion, it is often labelled with the related vehicle or situation to more specifically identify the ailment, e.g., car sickness, air sickness, sea sickness, space sickness, etc.

Apparent motion refers to a situation in which the individual is stationary, but motion in the visual field causes the individual to experience an illusion of motion. Apparent motion can occur in rotating

General autonomic components of motion sickness

The autonomic nervous system has afferent and efferent pathways to the organ systems of the body that help serve as a feed-back and feed-forward system to control internal states. In general, the parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system work reciprocally, with increasing parasympathetic nervous system and decreasing sympathetic nervous system activity tending to reduce activity of organ systems, and decreasing parasympathetic nervous system and increasing sympathetic

General gastrointestinal components of motion sickness

Because symptoms of nausea, stomach discomfort, the feeling of imminent vomiting, and sometimes actual vomiting are often associated with motion sickness, it is difficult to refute that the gastrointestinal system has a role in motion sickness. The majority of such research has focused on the role the stomach plays in motion sickness. Nonetheless, all components of the gastrointestinal system may have some involvement.

Putting it all together: the autonomic–gastrointestinal cascade during motion sickness

Stern (2002) proposed a model of nausea in response to exposure to an optokinetic drum stimulus that may have applicability to the autonomic and gastrointestinal cascade during the general syndrome of motion sickness generated by any given stimulus. Stern's (2002) model is shown in Fig. 1. The model proposes that a visual–vestibular mismatch leads to an increase in sympathetic nervous system activity and decrease in parasympathetic nervous system activity. These autonomic nervous system changes

Open questions and future directions

What is the relationship between specific focal symptoms or symptom clusters and the autonomic nervous system–gastrointestinal cascade? It is recommended that future motion sickness work examine motion sickness as a multi-dimensional syndrome and correlate the dimensions with the various physiological dependent measures. The Motion Sickness Assessment Questionnaire (Gianaros et al., 2001a) mentioned above is an excellent way to examine motion sickness as a syndrome but other approaches are

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