Lateral medullary infarction presenting as isolated vertigo and unilateral loss of visual suppression.

Isolated vertigo is rare in lateral medullary infarction. We described early diagnostic challenges in such cases by a neuro-otological approach. We report a 56-year-old man who developed a lateral medullary infarction that presented as isolated vertigo. Before the day 4 from disease onset when diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) became positive, this patient showed unilateral loss of visual suppression, a central type of vestibular dysfunction. Since MRI abnormalities may not appear in the early few days from disease onset, unilateral loss of visual suppression might become an important diagnostic option for isolated vertigo due to a lateral medullary infarction. This finding is presumably relevant to the inferior olive lesion.