The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Here’s a wonderful video interview with William Shatner talking about his tinnitus and how it affected him:

Best,
AudioNotch

Another cool paper has come out presenting animal research on the patho-physiology (abnormal physiology) that produces tinnitus. The abstract reads fairly easily:
Hearing loss often results in tinnitus and auditory cortical map changes, leading to the prevailing view that the phantom perception is associated with cortical reorganization.However, we show here that tinnitus is mediated by a cortical area lacking map reorganization.

High-frequency hearing loss results in two distinct cortical regions: a sensory-deprived region characterized by a decrease in inhibitory synaptic transmission and a normal hearing region showing increases in inhibitory and excitatory transmission and map reorganization.
The region deprived … Continue Reading

An interesting paper reveals a little bit more about the relationship between abnormal lateral inhibition and tinnitus. The abstract is a bit opaque:
Tinnitus is likely initiated by a discontinuity in the spontaneous or low-level-stimulus induced neural activity across auditory nerve fibers with different characteristic frequency (CF). This discontinuity may be caused by functional loss of outer hair cells in those regions where inner hair cells are preserved.

The reduced spontaneous activity for nerve fibers with CFs in the hearing loss range may result in a reduction of lateral inhibition at more central levels. This reduced lateral inhibition … Continue Reading

Here’s an e-mail we received from a user who was upset about what we charge for our tinnitus treatment service:
Hello,

I want to know and understand why you charge so much for this treatment?
I understand that developing etc. has cost you time and probably some money, but nowhere even close to what you are charging.

250$ / year is rather insane and most of the people in dire need of treatment can’t even hold down a job due to their endless suffering.
Obviously if you were guaranteed to have your tinnitus reduces to a loudness that doesn’t bother you, then a one time … Continue Reading

Interesting research offers a possible explanation as to why, even when exposed to the same external harmful noise stimulus, some individuals will develop tinnitus and other individuals will not. Extrapolating findings from research on animals may reveal why some people develop tinnitus while others do not.

Animals were exposed to a noise stimulus with the intention of destroying their hearing hair cells:
All nine noise-exposed rats showed similar patterns of severe hair cell loss at high- and mid-frequency regions in the exposed ear.
Subsequently, some of the rats expressed a protein in nervous system cells called GAP-43:
Eight of the nine showed strong up-regulation … Continue Reading

Tailor-Made Notched Sound Therapy is an umbrella term that subsumes two types of Notched Sound Therapy:

• Notched Music Therapy (also referred to as Tailor-Made Notched Sound Therapy by the researchers who discovered it)
• Notched White Noise Therapy (also referred to as Windowed Sound Therapy by the researchers who discovered it)

Proposed mechanism of Notched Music Therapy:

From this source:

The observed reductions in tinnitus loudness, annoyance and handicapping as well as the reductions in evoked neural activity appear cumulative, indicating a long-term neuroplastic effect. There is evidence in humans that tinnitus is associated with a relative … Continue Reading

The authors of a Notched Music Therapy study discuss why they believe that Notched Music does not work in people with a tinnitus frequency over 8,000 hZ (A.K.A. 8 khZ):
An additional crucial finding was that the TMNMT efficacy depended on the tinnitus frequency. Even though we had relatively amplified high frequency music energy during the filtering process (Figure 4), and despite having utilized a headphone that reliably transduced very high frequencies, the TMNMT was on average only effective for patients with tinnitus frequencies ≤8 kHz, but not for patients with frequencies above this value. From … Continue Reading

While long term follow up studies have not yet been done on individuals whose tinnitus volume decreased after a completed treatment with Notched Music, the researchers who developed it have written the following:

From a long term study on Notched Music Therapy conducted over several month’s duration:

The observed reductions in tinnitus loudness, annoyance and handicapping as well as the reductions in evoked neural activity appear cumulative, indicating a long-term neuroplastic effect. There is evidence in humans that tinnitus is associated with a relative excitatory-inhibitory cortical neural network dysbalance, at the expense of the inhibitory system.

This loss of … Continue Reading

Just a quick update – our blog posting hasn’t adhered to a particular schedule in the past since we’ve simply written content as we came across interesting tinnitus related subjects. In the future, we’ll be aiming on posting every Tuesday and Thursday (although you might see some other posts as well if we’ve got some interesting announcements that can’t wait!)

Best,
AudioNotch