The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Tinnitus Research 2014: what are some interesting new papers that have come out? When I’m writing the blog, I usually search the term “tinnitus” on google scholar and look for interesting papers that might be useful for our readers. Tinnitus is actually a very interesting research problem because it’s that nexus of a lot of work in neuroscience: the “bottom-up” approach of cellular neuroscience and the “top-down” approach of fMRI imaging, which visualizes blood flow to various large regions of the brain. People with tinnitus are constantly searching for promising new treatment avenues. I like to link to scientific papers that can show people with tinnitus that tinnitus research in 2014 is occurring across the globe. Here’s some interesting ones:

Some researchers used a “reverse-engineering” approach, taking all the drugs that resulted in tinnitus as a side effect and using that as a guide to find possible gene targets for therapy:

Tinnitus, phantom sound perception, is a worldwide highly prevalent disorder for which no clear underlying pathology has been established and for which no approved drug is on the market. Thus, there is an urgent need for new approaches to understand this condition. We used a network pharmacology side-effect analysis to search for genes that are involved in tinnitus generation. We analyzed a network of 1,313 drug–target pairs, based on 275 compounds that elicit tinnitus as side effect and their targets reported in databases, and used a quantitative score to identify emergent significant targets that were more common than expected at random. Cyclooxigenase 1 and 2 were significant, which validates our approach, since salicylate is a known tinnitus generator. More importantly, we predict previously unknown tinnitus-related targets. The present results have important implications toward understanding tinnitus pathophysiology and might pave the way toward the design of novel pharmacotherapies.

New advances in brain imaging may have considerable application to the study of tinnitus, allowing us to better visualize the affected neural pathways:

•Manganese enhanced MRI (MEMRI) is a powerful new imaging modality to study tinnitus.

•Voltage-gated calcium channels allow Mn²⁺entry which is retained by active neurons.

•MEMRI allows for longitudinal probing of neuronal function independent of blood flow.

•MEMRI is unaffected by scanner noise.

•Customized nanoparticle constructs may have direct utility to tinnitus research.

Tinnitus Research 2014: just a sampling of the interesting new work that’s being done in the field. What I like about reading about tinnitus research is how interdisciplinary it is: there’s so many different research approaches that can be used.