The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Please note: the following information does not constitute professional medical advice, and is provided for general informational purposes only. Please speak to your doctor if you have tinnitus.

Here’s some interesting links about tinnitus and tinnitus-related news:

• Resident Advisor, a web site for DJ’s, has written a Music Lover’s Guide to Tinnitus
• An old blog post in The New York Times has written about Suppressing Tinnitus with Music Therapy 
• If you haven’t already checked it out, go to Tinnitus Talk online forum – hands down the best resource online for people suffering … Continue Reading
  

Extremely interesting new research indicates that some tinnitus patients found a subjective improvement in their cognition when they took D-cycloserine:

People with tinnitus perceive ringing in their ears and this phantom noise can cause difficulty concentrating.

A new noise doesn’t make the perceived noise go away—but it does seem to help patients cope with it in their daily lives.

A pilot study shows that patients participating in computer-based cognitive training and taking a drug called d-cycloserine report greater improvements in the ability to go about their daily lives than patients … Continue Reading

Some of you may be aware of a new drug in development for the treatment of acute tinnitus acquired due to noise trauma. Noise trauma actually kills inner ear hair cells not via direct physical trauma, but via excitotoxicity from an increase in glutamate neurotransmitters. The AM-101 drug is designed to specifically counteract this process. Results of experiments thus far have provoked qualified interest. I’m paraphrasing here, but the idea seems to be preventing the “centralization” of the recurrent neural feedback loops that are theorized to result in chronic tinnitus by restoring the peripheral input to the … Continue Reading

What are the tinnitus treatment options that are promising right now? It’s difficult to assess research findings before extensive clinical trials have come out, but I can point towards some areas of research in tinnitus treatment that are promising in 2014: I’ve blogged about them before:

• New U of M Study Offers Promise in Developing Therapy for Tinnitus
• More on the Michigan Research
• Promising Early Results for Vagal Nerve Therapy for Tinnitus

In 2014, these are the tinnitus treatment options to look out for. As with any type of … Continue Reading

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

We’ve posted on a similar tinnitus study in the past linking neuroticism as a personality trait to tinnitus. Now, a new press article summarizes some of the findings in a more accessible framework:
People with ‘neurotic’ tendencies are more likely to be troubled by their tinnitus, a new study involving researchers at The University of Nottingham, has found.
The research, led by academics at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit, found that those who were lonely, worried or anxious, miserable or experiencing mood swings … Continue Reading

The development of tinnitus has a strong association with hearing loss. The association is so strong that many researchers believe that hearing loss is the most common cause of tinnitus – the evidence is very strong on this point.

However, some individuals have “normal” audiograms that have no detectable hearing loss on them, yet they still have tinnitus. These individuals typically also do not have any identifiable cause for their tinnitus.

It’s a puzzle, particularly given that most of the models we have to explain the development of tinnitus start with noise induced hearing loss.

But what if people with normal audiograms had undetectable … Continue Reading

A lot of people are puzzled by the fact that even though two individuals may have the same level of hearing loss, some people will develop tinnitus and others will not. This suggests that people may have different underlying levels of vulnerability to developing tinnitus. We’ve posted about research in the past that confirms this, and a new paper has come out that details another possible explanation.

In this model, predisposition to tinnitus occurs as follows:
Here we for the first time compare behavioral and neurophysiological data from hearing impaired Mongolian gerbils with (T) and without (NT) a tinnitus … 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