Alcohol Quiets Down My Tinnitus

[Jason C]

Jasons.....I feel for you both. I also think it CAN get better for you both.
My tinnitus (24/7 high pitched hiss plus intermittent PT) started with a very mild virus in Oct 2014. Eustachian tube dysfunction, grommets, T-tubes, severe depression,panic attacks, deafness, vertigo (unrelated ....Benign Positional) all made their way into my life and almost took it. But not now...though I have tinnitus as bad, or worse than ever.
Sound-generating hearing aids helped quite a bit, but I use them less now as the tinnitus no longer really bothers me. Anti-depressants drove out the 'black beasts' of depression and panic. Alcohol makes me forget about the tinnitus (but I think it's probably there at the same volume)....I enjoy wine and drink it quite often, but don't enjoy being drunk or getting hangovers, so am a moderate drinker. I go to the cinema, music gigs etc (plus good quality earplugs)....tinnitus stays the same.
I think you are probably suffering from the mental health issues that tinnitus brings with it....tailored help from professionals is the way to go.
If, actually I mean when (but in the first year or so of tinnitus you may not see this) you can ignore the tinnitus, the tinnitus will improve. It IS there, it is always there, but with neglect it improves.
I really do hope that I don't sound like I'm smug/preaching etc. That's not my intent. What I'm trying to do is to say that life/tinnitus etc will improve, but, like those things/people etc you love, tinnitus thrives on attention, it rolls up when neglected.

Fungus

I hope you are right but I am 7 months into this and not even slightly better with it.

 

[Fungus]

Jason C, 7 months may feel like an eternity to you, but it often takes a while longer than that to come to terms with the changed reality that tinnitus brings. Eventually most of us reach a state whereby we'd love to have silence back, but tinnitus just becomes another part of what we identify as 'self' and the intensely negative connotations mellow into disregard.

Tinnitus is a slimy little b******d which is like an unwanted guest who, never invited in the first place, then refuses to leave. Don't waste your time on him. Maybe he will leave of his own accord from lack of attention,or, if he stays, will be totally ignored.

Good luck,

Fungus

 

[Tom Cnyc]

booze helped me a ton during my worst stages. in my opinion its better to have 2-3 glasses of wine than take benzos, and that's exactly what I did.

My T has gotten pretty mild lately. Right now I have a very gentle buzz in my left ear that if i stretch my neck a certain way - will go away for a minute or two. Some days I have total silence. The only time I seem to have full blown T like my first 4-5 months these days is when I've got a bad hangover, so ironically what helped in the beginning is now a trigger.

thankfully I have to drink a ton to be hungover. Yesterday I had 4 glasses of wine and a cocktail (I'm on vacation)and I'm feeling pretty damn good right now. About to hit the gym.

to anyone reading this - just be sure to not use tonic water as a mixer if you do decide to drink with tinnitus. quinine is well known to cause T, it just doesn't say so on the bottle. I wish I knew this, as I was drinking almost 2 liters of it a week in the 6-8 months leading up to my acoustic trauma as GnT had become my drink of choice. Can't say that's what caused it, but im sure it didn't help.

 

[Kratos]

Same here , few beers and i am T free. ?

Interesting. Can you use that technique when you have a spike to bring T back to baseline instead of waiting for days for the spike to settle?

 

[Louise]

Yes, I'm putting this in the Treatments section. For this reason. .... a very excessive intake of alcohol makes the Tinnitus drop to almost zero the next morning.

Why?

Its an obscene amount that results in this phenomenon. But why?

I have to find out as that is the clue to my particular mechanism.

Why does a massive intake of Alcohol give me almost silence from severe Tinnitus 8 hours after cessation of the drug?

I don't subscribe to the brain hyperactivity caused by Glutamate resulting from the loss of sensory input theory as that would happen if I created silence from earplugs before T. And it did not.

I want to know what excessive alcohol does. My theory is that it calms the Auditory Nerve. It calms the nerve. With a reduction of Glutamate maybe.

Does anyone know?

 

[linearb]

I don't subscribe to the brain hyperactivity caused by Glutamate resulting from the loss of sensory input theory as that would happen if I created silence from earplugs before T. And it did not.

I don't think this is accurate, for a couple reasons:
* there is often an onset delay. Losing input for some relatively short amount of time is not the same as losing it permanently -- and, a number of experiments where people have been placed in total silence for a more extended period have demonstrated that most people (high 90s % in one study) do eventually start to perceive high and low pitched tones.

* blocking audio input with an earplug is not likely to be neurologically identical to nerve damage resulting from auditory trauma. In the case of the first thing, you still have a normal and functional set of hair cells and wiring to the brain; in the latter, you don't. When the body is injured, all kinds of physiological processes start happening.

* the theory you are describing is something which has been extensively studied clinically, refined over a period of decades, and validated by a large number of animal and human experiments over the past several decades including numerous fMRI imaging studies. So, yes, it's still a theory, subject to further refinement and research, but so is gravity.

I want to know what excessive alcohol does. My theory is that it calms the Auditory Nerve. It calms the nerve. With a reduction of Glutamate maybe.

Does anyone know?

Off the top of my head, in the short term alcohol causes a significant increase in GABA-mediated inhibition through chloride channel activation -- and also causes changes in fluid density in the inner ear, which can affect hearing. As your liver processes the alcohol, fairly toxic compounds (aldehydes) are created. I am less sure if single high-dose use of alcohol causes any significant GABA downregulation.

Alcohol is one of the oldest and best studied drugs, so there is a ton of information on this available. However -- it is not by any means a trivial drug; if you compare it to something slightly similar like Xanax which also causes an uptick in GABA-mediated inhibition, Xanax works very specifically, and alcohol does a ton of different things in different places. This appears to be a reasonable overview of the systems affected:
https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/alcohol/alcohol_pharmacology1.shtml

Adding additional complexity, you don't appear to be asking about the direct, short-term effects of alcohol, but about what happens the following morning. This short article brushes on some of that, but is pretty simplistic:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/anatomy-hangover/story?id=12509637

You are definitely not the first person I've known to report that their tinnitus is greatly reduced 12-24 hours after excessive alcohol intake, so there is clearly something interesting there, but I don't know if it is at all well understood by anyone. For what it's worth, when I am in that exact same situation, my tinnitus is much worse than usual...

 

[Coyotesheaven]

Could be because it damages the nerves and hair cells that are still alive, but functioning abnormally and already damaged by another stressor. Could also be that the brain becomes a bit less active when on alcohol, certain processes slow down, and synapse activity in certain areas get shut down; all of these can lead to a decrease in hyperactivity, which could be leading to tinnitus in the first place.

Alcohol is generally bad news for T or inner ear problems.

 

[Louise]

I don't think this is accurate, for a couple reasons:
* there is often an onset delay. Losing input for some relatively short amount of time is not the same as losing it permanently -- and, a number of experiments where people have been placed in total silence for a more extended period have demonstrated that most people (high 90s % in one study) do eventually start to perceive high and low pitched tones.

Not really a relatively short amount of time.... I slept in earplugs every night for decades. No problem. So let's say the most time at one stretch might have been 12 hours. That's still a long time in silence. And not the faintest note of T. That's why I'm not buying the brain hyperactivity theory.

* blocking audio input with an earplug is not likely to be neurologically identical to nerve damage resulting from auditory trauma. In the case of the first thing, you still have a normal and functional set of hair cells and wiring to the brain; in the latter, you don't. When the body is injured, all kinds of physiological processes start happening.

Exactly my point. I think it's auditory nerve damage which is the issue. Nothing to do with brain hyperactivity because it's lost sound. In those decades of creating silence every night to sleep before T, my brain couldn't have given a hoot that it lost sound input. I now put my noise down to erroneous signals from the damaged nerve fibres in the ears.

I'll read those citations of yours linearb, so thanks very much for taking the time.

Scientists should pay more attention to this phenomenon. Here you have someone tortured by loud T which almost completely goes away after tons of alcohol. It's just begging to be investigated.

 

[Jake007]

I have 3 or 4 beers before bed, helps me relax and fall asleep.

 

[linearb]

@Louise well, all I can say is that the "brain hyperactivity following signal input" theory is something which has been pretty carefully studied and reproduced in animals a lot -- and, even 12 hours, may not be nearly long enough. And, again, signal loss from nerve damage is fundamentally very different from low signal input. Like, even with earplugs in, if you have perfectly working nerves, your high frequency hearing cells are still sending data into your brain. If you damage them, they are not. Research from the University of Michigan over the past few years has demonstrated this in animals (and they are busy at work on a human treatment based on their ideas). But, this is what they were able to show in animals:

when you damage the auditory nerve, there is a loss of signal on the auditory nerve.

the auditory nerve goes into the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) of the brain.

after noise trauma, the input to the DCN is reduced. However, the output from the DCN is NOT. So, this means that there is some kind of "signal gain" happening inside the DCN.

the DCN is a place where different kinds of sensory data, including audio and touch-sensing (skin nerve) data, get integrated.

following a noise trauma, there is a reduction in the amount of noise-related neurons in the DCN -- and an increase in the number of touch-sensing neurons, and they are "talking to each other"

so, what they think is happening is, the DCN is trying hard to be "homeostatic" -- keeping the body in the same state all the time. you have some damage, and there's less audio coming in, but there's still all this "touch" data -- so the brain just sort of messes itself up, and wires those touch-sensing nerves into the auditory cortex. So basically you start "hearing" the sound of your touch-sensing neurons.

this also would explain why the vast majority of people with tinnitus can change the sound to some extent through muscle movements.

So -- yeah, the initial problem, is the loss of audio input -- and if you could restore the audio input, presumably after some period of time the brain might un-mess itself. But, the thing actually "creating" the phantom sound, is not the auditory nerve. It is the dorsal cochlear nucleus of the brain.

this video goes through this in more detail than I understand, but I found it interesting:

 

[RaZaH]

If I get drunk, I have zero T .

 

[RaZaH]

It is the dorsal cochlear nucleus of the brain.

Very interesting, possibly means that restored hearing would not fix T.

 

[linearb]

Very interesting, possibly means that restored hearing would not fix T.

yeah, hard to say -- but -- the neuroplastic changes in the DCN happen in response to the signal loss, so if the signal were restored, maybe it wouldn't be an instant fix to T, but something which would happen over the next couple weeks?

the treatment they are attempting, based on the work in that video, is not geared at fixing the hearing loss, but at tricking the DCN into rewiring itself with carefully timed audio/electrical stimulus. I was a guinea pig in their first human trial, and while it did not eliminate my tinnitus, I do believe that it suppressed it to some extent. Unfortunately for me, the effect wore off within a few days of the trial ending -- but if they ever get a device approved to market, just using it a couple times a day indefinitely wouldn't be much of a burden, it's pretty passive.

 

[GregCA]

I was a guinea pig in their first human trial, and while it did not eliminate my tinnitus, I do believe that it suppressed it to some extent. Unfortunately for me, the effect wore off within a few days of the trial ending -- but if they ever get a device approved to market, just using it a couple times a day indefinitely wouldn't be much of a burden, it's pretty passive.

Can you point me to the paper describing the clinical trial? You got me interested!
Is it on clinicaltrials.gov ?

 

[linearb]

Can you point me to the paper describing the clinical trial? You got me interested!
Is it on clinicaltrials.gov ?

I don't think they have published yet but if you google "susan shore tinnitus bimodal stimulation" you should find the relevant research which has been published. Also, if you google "neuroengineering tinnitus" you'll find a youtube video where she talks about it.

 

[GregCA]

I don't think they have published yet but if you google "susan shore tinnitus bimodal stimulation" you should find the relevant research which has been published. Also, if you google "neuroengineering tinnitus" you'll find a youtube video where she talks about it.

Is it this clinical trial?

 

[thering]

Any specific alcohol? Maybe it has some nutrient in the specific beverage that you may have an underlying deficiency?

 

[linearb]

Is it this clinical trial?

yup that's definitely it.

note that they actually attempted to assess tinnitus loudness as part of their outcome measures, and not just THI changes which are a lot more woo-woo

 

[Louise]

Thanks @linearb for some great information. I've still to digest it properly as I have been out and about doing Tinnitus stuff At least from the test today I know that my hearing hasnt changed.I do have some points to raise from what you've given me but I want to study it all first. Thanks very much.

 

[BuzzyBee]

Alcohol helps my tinnitus too, but I've never noticed the tinnitus being lower the day after overindulging. I tend to drink the same moderate amount and get the same moderate (temporary) relief.

The Susan Shore works is fascinating, but I haven't heard any updates regarding this special device and am wondering what happened with the research.

 

[Jake007]

I heard that alcohol and benzos have "something" in common although a benzo would not completely stop my T like alcohol does.

Alcohol takes your t away like 100% away?

 

[RaZaH]

If i get drunk I have zero tinnitus, literally 100% tinnitus free.
Come to think of it , I guess alcohol thins blood ? Maybe that is it ?

 

[Rasmus]

Alcohol completely resolves my symptoms. Anyone else?

does alcohol help against T? ;D that would be a nice cure i have heard it made it worse :/

 

[Jason C]

For me alcohol really helps, couple of glasses of red wine and maybe a shot of whiskey and it's all good. The balance issue stays but is morphed with the alcohol, it's a double edged sword but better than reality.

 

[Tom Cnyc]

does alcohol help against T? ;D that would be a nice cure i have heard it made it worse :/

it doesn't make it worse. a hangover does suck though.

 

[Jacob83]

alcohol is one of the very few things that affects my T. A beer or two doesn't really do anything to it, but if I tie one on and enjoy more than a few pints of a delicious ale, my head is just buzzing with T.

 

[stophiss]

For me alcohol tones my T down a shade...or rather...getting a slight buzz makes me completely not focus on my T...I care less about it. But it generally doesn't turn my T down to zero.

All said, I never use alcohol to get rid of my T. I only drink in certain social situations for fun because on balance I am all about health and living a healthy lifestyle. A steady diet of alcohol doesn't fit my lifestyle.

 

[Foncky]

It makes it way worse for me.

So I drink beers with no alcohol and I'm very boring.

 

[Jake007]

I wish it took away all symptoms but it does make me not care about it or think about it as much. It's the only thing getting me to fall asleep the past two months.

 

[Louise]

I've not heard of the Susan Shore works. I'll have to google it. Still trying to study what linearb posted before but not been up to it.