Search results for query: *

There is no mystery as to why not all noise-induced hearing loss leads to tinnitus. First of all, let's think about noise. Noise exposure has highly heterogeneous effects on cochlear sensory cells, non-sensory cells, and primary cochlear neurons. The heterogeneous effect of the noise damage...

Thanks, I would enjoy the chance to be a part of that. I take a lot of inspiration from the Tinnitus Talk community. Hi @Nick47, yes, there is a lot of noise out there. Recognizing which peer-reviewed results are breakthroughs versus short-lived sparks in the dark is not obvious and seems to be...

My compliments on such a polished and thorough resource. @Hazel, my feedback is that the author's treatment of the Central Gain Model contains a few errors and misunderstandings. What does not come through in their description is that excess central gain is a consequence of reduced inhibition...

Cumin oil and unipolar brush cells have NOTHING to do with one another. I’m suggesting that discussions about unipolar brush cells are interesting and worthwhile. Take it easy...

Tinnitus is measured through a highly subjective self report. Any type of clinical study that uses self-report instead of an objective measure runs the risk of having placebo effects strongly influence their outcome measure. If a study like this does not include a placebo control, it is, at...

It’s not useless, it’s basic science. It’s a perfectly wonderful study about how neurons are affected by a neurotransmitter that is not often linked to the operations of this particular brain area. This is a basic science study. Work of this nature is the bedrock of medicine. These insights...

Snake oil is another way of saying a bogus therapy. I find it frustrating when people who use “Dr” in their title, waltz into a discussion in this excellent forum and write something totally unrelated to the topic of the thread and instead start plugging bogus science on an unrelated theme. This...

This study has very little to say about serotonin and tinnitus. They applied non-physiologic concentrations of serotonergic agonist to slices of young mouse brainstem. The connection to tinnitus and SSRIs is weak, at best. It’s really a slice physiology basic science study that got hyped by...

That utterly and completely misses the point of this article, doc. They are describing a structural signature for a potential key neuronal regulator of tinnitus perception. This cell type (UBCs) are positioned to play a key role in amplifying activity within the central authority pathway and...

Haha. Oh wow, that is embarrassing. My poor, porous memory...

Hi @linearb, we are totally on the same page. What makes the treatment condition special (i.e., different than the control group) is the specific timing between the sound and the tactile stimulation. To adapt the famous George Costanza quote, "it's not a placebo control unless you believe it"...

Hey oxytocin fans, I'm chiming into this thread a bit late, with apologies if these points have already been raised. Oxytocin is a peptide that can be introduced exogenously (from outside your body) but there is a lot of debate as to whether and how it is able to cross the blood-brain barrier...

If I post that information I will put their placebo control at risk, potentially excluding people on this forum from participating in their trial. The timing info is public domain knowledge, if you know where to look. Sorry to be cryptic, but it might be for the best if I don't say.

The idea is to deliver a tactile stimulus to the jaw at a specific time interval relative to moderate sound stimulation. Their hypothesis is that this will tap into a process called spike timing-dependent plasticity to dampen a hyperactive neural circuit in the auditory brainstem. The biggest...

Like Aaron said, it's a poster abstract. No peer review. I think non-invasive direct brain stimulation has potential, though it's hard to control and the parameter space to be explored with respect to tinnitus mitigation is too large for any careful, exhaustive study. Most of the research in...

That's not how tinnitus works. Damage to the ear has virtually immediate effects on the brain. The perception of tinnitus -whether acute or chronic- obligatory involves the brain, though does not always involve the ear.

@EatMoTacos Hey @EatMoTacos, no, sorry, the point of that last discussion with @Steve drifted a little bit from the topic of masking and tinnitus pitch masking. To your question, there is no single mode of temporal activity in the brain. Individual neurons can fire as rapidly as 1000 times per...

@Steve, this paper came up with a clever way to nest a low-frequency binaural rhythm (i.e. dichotic) in the theta/alpha range inside a higher frequency diotic envelope. Could be fun for you to play with this strategy as well. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2016 Dec;17(6):591-607. Epub 2016 Sep 14...

What I can say for sure is that neurons throughout the auditory pathways in the brain will synchronize to binaural beats in the beta, alpha, theta or delta range. If you can entrain the firing of neurons at that frequency, it should set up a strong network signature at that frequency that would...

Have you considered moving the speakers or the piano to the back of the room so that they are closer to the students but farther from your ears? The bodies of the students will absorb/reflect some of the sound waves. You could also add some basic paneling to the walls to reduce...

Director of a tinnitus research laboratory

Hi Samir, you'll have to give me a little more context for what you mean by "binaural fusion". The inputs from the two ear are fused at a very early stage of processing in the auditory brainstem. Our perception of where sounds occur in space arises directly from precise computations of tiny...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbeqw8/should-you-pull-a-baby-driver-and-use-music-to-drown-out-your-tinnitus

Massachusetts Eye and Ear just received a large award from the NIH to develop new functional tests to reveal the pathology underlying "hidden hearing loss". This award binds four research groups (one project per group) into a clinical research center. Project Number: 1P50DC015857-01A1 Contact...

I know, it seems crazy. The root of the problem comes down to the sociology of medicine. Tinnitus and hidden hearing loss fall at the intersection of neurology, otolaryngology, and audiology. It should be on all of their radars, but in fact it ends up on none. The pathology is not the result of...

Well, let's not get too dismayed about the sum total of what we don't know. I think we do know what constitutes normal, healthy hearing. If audiologists would loosen their grip on the 0.5-8k audiogram and begin including a few additional measures such as speech in noise testing, otoacoustic...

Most people in the central gain camp think it is a heterosynaptic plasticity process. That means that all synaptic inputs impinging on a neuron with increased gain will get amplified, whether the input is conveying an acoustic signal from the environment or the spontaneous firing of nearby...

I'm less familiar with the relationship you described. Most people with high-frequency hearing loss experience the tinnitus pitch to be slightly higher than the steepest slope of the audibility loss, as described here: Course of hearing loss and occurrence of tinnitus O König, R Schaette, R...

To clarify, think of central gain as a u-shaped curve. -Prolonged periods in very quiet environments are associated with low levels of electrical signaling flowing into the brain from the auditory nerve. The brain's amplifier compensates by turning up central gain. This is why people who don't...

Nice catch. Yes, this is one implication of studies that would seek to dial down the central gain. Ideally, the "knob" could be turned down just enough to silence the T without causing audibility to take too much of a hit. But this is pie in the sky at this point. The central gain knob has only...

Maybe you will indulge me in a little experiment. I was wondering if you could play scales (or another melody) where all/most of the notes are focused on frequencies close the border of your hearing loss. As a musician, I am sure you can do this with few errors. Since you are an audio geek (like...

Yes, there are hundreds of studies in animal models that look at 'plasticity' in the tonotopic arrangement of sound frequencies that accompany hearing loss and/or actively discriminating sounds in a narrow frequency region. In fact, many of the most important studies on this topic were done at...

No, this is anecdotal. It has been relayed to me by clinicians and patients. There may be research papers on it but I cannot name them. The problem is that tinnitus severity is subjective and communicated through self-report. Many researchers are put off by the perceived problem that the act of...

Yes, I agree with you 100%. Thanks for bringing this up. In fact, masking therapies are probably the most reliable form of tinnitus suppression. They don't introduce a lot of negative side effects, so there isn't a major cost in people firing out what works for them. Beyond the tinnitus...

For someone with notched or steeply sloping hearing loss, signals essential for communication (e.g., speech reception) might overlap with regions of the cochlea with reduced or absent sensitivity to sound. These transposition aids shift those signals into a cochlear region where thresholds or...

The mechanism is tied into the central gain theory of tinnitus. The typical explanation is that most tinnitus is triggered by pathology in the middle or inner ear that has the effect of reducing the quality and strength of the signal transmitted from the inner ear to the brain. The loss of input...

TinnitusPro is a piece of software that let's you listen to music of your choosing that is passed through a notch filter. To be fair, their software conditions the signal with a few more bells and whistles than just a simple notch, but, in a nutshell this is notch software that anyone can try...

Yes, you are absolutely right about that. My recollection from seeing a talk a few months ago was that the pre-clinical data were strong enough to warrant a healthy dose of funding from a big Pharma partner for Phase 1. I'll ask around and if I learn anything useful will report back...

Not sure if this was brought up, but this is a paper from a very productive, reputable lab that is not at Mass. Eye and Ear that casts some doubt on the recent findings in human subjects from Maison and Liberman - Tinnitus with a normal audiogram: Relation to noise exposure but no evidence for...