Association of Bilateral Vestibulopathy With the

Background and Objectives: Bilateral vestibulopathy (BVP) is a chronic disorder resulting from bilateral loss of peripheral vestibular function. Although several etiologies have been identified, such as ototoxic exposure, bilateral Menière disease, and, more recently, monogenic causes including Methods: We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in a European cohort of 132 individuals with idiopathic BVP and 3,410 unaffected controls. Clinical and demographic data were collected from affected individuals. Patients were diagnosed according to the Bárány Society criteria using video head-impulse testing and/or caloric irrigation. After stringent quality control and outlier removal, genome-wide association testing was conducted on approximately 7.3 million imputed variants, followed by gene-based and functional post-GWAS analyses, including functional variant annotation, expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping, chromatin interaction analysis, gene-set enrichment, and regulatory motif annotation. Results: Three variants at 2 loci reached genome-wide significance. The strongest association was observed at the chromosome 19p12 Discussion: This study identifies the