On the mechanism of vestibular disturbances caused by industrial solvents.

The industrial solvents xylene, styrene, trichloroethylene and methylchloroform administered to rabbits caused a positional nystagmus and disturbances in the nystagmus response to rotatory acceleration. The positional nystagmus had a beat direction the opposite to positional alcohol nystagmus, which was in similar experiments elicited by methanol, ethanol and propanol. The three alcohols needed a ten times higher blood concentration to cause a nystagmus than the solvents did.