The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Dana White, the well known president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is another notable public figure who suffers from Tinnitus. He suffers from tinnitus secondary to Meniere’s disease, and is currently booked for a surgical treatment in 2013:
Meniere’s Disease affects the inner ear and causes “spontaneous episodes of vertigo along with fluctuating hearing loss, ringing in the ear (tinnitus), and sometimes a feeling of fullness or pressure in your ear,” according to Mayo Clinic. Frequent and persistent air travel is the likely culprit for White’s condition, seeing as how he criss-crosses the … Continue Reading

Here is a link to a long list of highly accomplished individuals who suffer from Tinnitus. One of my favorites is Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
From “Confessions” (1780) “…a great noise started up in my ears, a noise that was triple or rather quadruple, compounded of a low and muffled humming, a softer murmuring as though of running water, a piercing whistle…This internal noise was so loud that it robbed me of the keen ear I had previously enjoyed and made me, not completely deaf, but hard of hearing… in spite of the throbbing in … Continue Reading

Unsurprisingly, the prevalence of tinnitus among famous musicians who tour and perform extensively appears to be extremely high (at least anecdotally). Consider the case of Barbra Streisand – yet another victim of what appears to be noise induced hearing loss, and subsequent sensorineural tinnitus:
Streisand, writes Mann, suffers from tinnitus, or ringing in her ears, when she’s in a stressful situation. He theorizes that the noisy audiences exacerbated the tinnitus and led to her abruptly walk off the stage in the middle of one of her numbers.

Galpern, Free Press reviewer Gene Telpner and the musicians in the … Continue Reading

A fascinating article on NBC shows the incredible prevalence of hearing loss and tinnitus among U.S. armed forces personnel returning from conflicts abroad:
“You’ve been to a concert – you know how your ears are ringing afterward? It’s just like that my entire life,” Brogan said. “A lot of guys get home and they probably don’t even think about getting their hearing checked.
Changes in the noise exposure risks also appear to have contributed to the current epidemic of hearing damage and tinnitus:
“I suspect today’s generation of veterans – those who have been in a combat environment – … Continue Reading

An interesting new paper has shown evidence that the administration of memantine, a drug that block NMDA-type glutamate receptors, may reduce the volume of chronic tinnitus. The research was performed in animals, although tinnitus response was measured by an indirect correlate (tinnitus-associated behaviour). Click here for the paper.
We re-investigated the effects of memantine on the behavioral manifestations of tinnitus induced by acoustic trauma (a 16-kHz, 110-dB pure tone presented unilaterally for 1 h) in rats. We used a conditioned lick suppression model in which lick suppression was associated with the perception of high … Continue Reading

Recent research has summarized the following the model as one of the leading hypotheses behind the pathological basis of tinnitus:
A compelling hypothesis is that tinnitus results from a maladaptive plastic net down-regulation of inhibitory amino acid neurotransmission in the central auditory pathway. This loss of inhibition may be a compensatory response to loss of afferent input such as that caused by acoustic insult and/or age-related hearing loss, the most common causes of tinnitus in people. Compensatory plastic changes may result in pathologic neural activity that underpins tinnitus.
So basically, one of the current theories is a sequential … Continue Reading

History, unfortunately, has repeated itself. Popular musician Grimes has experienced hearing damage so severe that she’s had to call off multiple concerts. This episode really stresses the importance of education in preventing hearing damage (and possibly tinnitus) from noise-based exposure.
Canadian electro-pop star Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) was recently forced off the road. “Hey guys, so sorry 4 the cancelled shows. im having trouble w hearing loss, tinnitus & am trying 2 stay away from loud music 4 a bit,” she tweeted after cancelling a string of Canadian dates.
Furthermore, hearing loss at concerts is exacerbated by the consumption … Continue Reading

The New York Times wrote a brief article on Notched Music Therapy when some of the earlier research was published several years ago. Click here to check it out! In fact, there’s a great explanatory paragraph on the mechanism underlying the therapy:
The researchers suggest that two things might be happening in the auditory cortex to bring about the improvement. The neurons in the cortex related to the ringing frequency are presumably not being stimulated, because those frequencies are absent from the music. At the same time, nearby neurons may have been actively suppressing the tinnitus-related neurons, … Continue Reading

There are many possible avenues for a total tinnitus cure (i.e. a complete cessation of all tinnitus symptoms). We’ve posted before on the positive results of using stem cells to restore hearing following the death of cochlear hearing cells. Most people have sensorineural tinnitus induced by hearing loss, so theoretically, some of the maladpative neuroplastic changes could be undone if normal external auditory input was restored by reversing hearing loss. While the following study did not involve animals with tinnitus, researchers were able to transplant stem cells into deaf gerbils, allowing them to hear again:
Scientists have … Continue Reading

There’s a great deal of interesting research on tinnitus pitch matching – a term synonymous with tinnitus pitch detection, or “tinnitus tuning.” An important paper we’d like to bring to the attention of AudioNotch users is entitled “Comparison of manual and computer-automated procedures for tinnitus pitch-matching.” This paper has some very important lessons for those of us interested in matching our tinnitus pitch. Consider the following points culled from the paper’s abstract:
Three methods for tinnitus pitch-matching were performed in a group of 42 subjects. Two methods were computer-automated (Binary and Subject-Guided) and the third method as a traditional manual technique.

Each … Continue Reading