Unilateral vestibular lesion results in a typical syndrome characterized by postural imbalance, alteration of locomotion and gaze stabilization as well as cognitive and neurovegetative disorders. One of the main difficulties encountered in the development of new anti-vertigo drugs is the lack of sensitivity in the evaluation of this syndrome. The use of a dynamic weight-bearing device has revealed postural alterations in rats with unilateral vestibular neurectomy (UVN) on the left side (Tighilet et al., 2017). With a new version of this device, we can quantify additional parameters of postural and locomotor equilibrium. The objective of this study is to use this device to set new parameters on our rat model of vestibular pathology.

We extracted different biomarkers from this device: the support surface, the weight distribution of rats when they are static or dynamic, and the successive positions of rat's barycenter.

Before UVN, rats show a symmetric distribution of their weight along the lateral axis. In the acute phase after UVN, rats distribute more weight on the right when they are static and then they put more weight on the left side. After UVN, the support surface of the rats increases, and the barycenter distribution show a higher dispersion.

This study provides new information on the postural balance pattern observed after vestibular loss in rats. These data show a new way of quantifying the postural deficit associated with vestibular damage and the compensatory strategies adopted. These results could guide us on the validation of pharmacological compounds favoring the balance recovery.