The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Fascinating research from the University of Michigan has illuminated some amazing new results:
She explains that in tinnitus, some of the input to the brain from the ear’s cochlea is reduced, while signals from the somatosensory nerves of the face and neck, related to touch, are excessively amplified.

“It’s as if the signals are compensating for the lost auditory input, but they overcompensate and end up making everything noisy,” says Shore.

The new findings illuminate the relationship between tinnitus, hearing loss and sensory input and help explain why many tinnitus sufferers can change the volume and … 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

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 long been a great deal of anecdotal evidence indicating that positional changes of the head and neck can dynamically and instantaneously affect one’s tinnitus tone and volume. The exact pathophysiology of why this is the case has long been a mystery, but most suspected that varying sensory nerves in the head and neck region were supplying neurological input into the brain that could modify the perception of tinnitus. Finally, someone has created an animal model to indicate that somatosensory neurons have been implicated in a guinea pig animal model of tinnitus:
U-M researchers previously demonstrated that after hearing … Continue Reading