this disease is, however, not very solid, and some form of "atypical Ménière's disease" remains a remote possibility. Motion sickness was present throughout his life and became apparent very early, when he suffered horribly from seasickness during the whole Beagle voyage. Darwin himself had the opinion that most of his health problems had an origin in his four-year bout with seasickness. Later, he could not stand traveling by carriage, and only horse riding would not affect his health. Psychic alteration often accompanies Ménière's and many other chronic diseases. An argument put forward for a diagnosis of Ménière's is that Darwin hunted a lot when he was young and could have damaged his inner ear with the repeated noise of shooting. While it is not unlikely that the noise damaged the inner ear and caused tinnitus, it could not have caused Ménière's disease. While Ménière's disease patients suffer during vertigo attacks from sickness and vomiting, the dyspepsia problems of Darwin have nothing to do with it. One of the diagnoses that he received from his physicians at the time was that of "suppressed gout"; the idea that this was an early name for Ménière's lacks any ground. Cyclic vomiting syndrome The pathologist John A. Hayman of the University of Melbourne has presented a case that Darwin's symptoms indicate that he suffered from cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS), an illness associated with mitochondrial DNA abnormalities. His paper on the topic was accepted by the BMJ and the Medical Journal of Australia, and was published in December 2009. In a supplement published in February 2012, he proposed that stroke-like episodes of memory loss and partial paralysis which do not occur with CVS are characteristic of the MELAS syndrome. An A3243G mtDNA mutation has been found in 80% of patients with this syndrome, and has also been described in those with CVS. This mutation in mitochondria is associated with symptoms of intestinal problems, seasickness and Ménière's disease as well as CVS and MELAS syndrome, thus giving a shared source of the various problems that affected Darwin. Any mitochondrial disease would have been inherited from his mother Susannah Darwin, whose own mother had 8 other children. Some of them had illnesses which could have been related to the same mutation. CVS was also proposed as part of the cause in a 2011 analysis by gastroenterologist Sidney Cohen of the medical college of Thomas Jefferson University in