Hey guys today I had my final appointment of the open label round and I decided against doing a 3rd round, so this will be my last update for the study. Everything checked out good, the doctors and research assistants were great as usual, and I am glad to have participated in this trial. They thanked me, and I thanked them even if the results did not end up as good as we all had hoped.
Trial(Completed):
AM-101 initial trial
Base T the day/week before AM-101 trial injections:
Left ear: 3/10
Right ear: 1/10
1 week update
2 weeks update
1 month update
2 months update
Results from AM-101 initial trial: I noticed a significant improvement immediately beginning with week 1. By the end of week 4 after injections I was having regular days or half-days of silence, as many as 4 that week, and lower T overall. After that they became more rare over the past 2 months, with 1-2 days of silence a week leading up to the following trial but my T held at lower levels on average.
Trial(Completed):
AMPACT/Open Label Round 1
1 week update
2 weeks update
1 month update
unplanned update 1
unplanned update 2
3 months update - Final update.
Date of initial T Onset:
1/21/2016
Cause: Noise induced. Ear buds. Prolonged session of producing music in FL studio.
Base T the day/week before AMPACT injections:
Left ear: 0-3
Right ear: 0-1
Tinnitus description before injections:
After the initial AM-101 trial, I ended up with fleeting T ranging below my baseline, and random days of silence. I noticed the best frequency of silent days was towards the end of the first month. By month 3, before this round of injections, they settled at around 1-2 days of silence a week.
Date of injections:
5/27/2016-5/29/2016, 4 months since onset
Have you felt any change/improvement/worsening since the injections?
Yes.
Yes. No.
This round was definitely a different pattern than the previous, and by that I mean, it seems as if there was no pattern at all. Initially it began with no noticeable change during the first week of injections, and throughout the first month. The only thing I had in common with the first round was that week 4 was the best week after injections, with multiple days of silence, and barely noticeable T. Whereas in the first round I had a setback week 5, this time around the good days continued. It actually continued for the entire 2nd month. I had countless days of silence and T was not a part of my life for almost the entire. So things seemed really promising. Then....similarly to the first round, I had a setback. Except this time much more significant. My third month began with a string of 2 weeks of non-stop T, fluctuating anywhere from 1-3. I had maybe 2 days of silence the entire month. Whereas after the first round of injections, I had settled with 1-2 days of silence a week by my third round. It was definitely a more noticeable setback also because of the prolonged time period that I went without really noticing T, almost an entire month.
That setback was enough to make me change my mind about participating in another round, because I just can't see a reasonable pattern of improvement. It's far too random to attribute to the injections, even compared to the first round where the improvement there was immediate after the injections and continued to improve over the next week, all the way through the first month.
This time around, at best, even if we are to attribute my month 2 improvement to AM-101, the pattern seemed to show a delayed,
temporary, reduction and improvement followed by a very long setback that is still continuing. And that isn't enough for me to continue with it. In the end, these days, sleep has a much more significant effect on my T, as has always seem to have been the case, than anything else. Whether it's loud and I sleep and I wake up with it lower, or whether I have silence and I sleep and it comes back I have the most solid correlations between T and sleep.
Current T severity and average T severity over the past week:
Current: 1/10. Stayed a pretty loud 2 and actually had one of my louder days today where it raised up to a 3 while doing my audio test in the audiologist booth. Ironically, when I was doing the test in the trial on previous visits, I seemed to have always had no T or nearly no T. Good thing there was no loudness matching today, or my results would have probably been counterproductive for AM-101 compared to my previous loudness matching tests.
Average over the past week: 2/10
Have you experienced any lasting (side) effects from the procedure?
No. I had my final follow up, everything was normal. My hearing seems to be the same as in the beginning of the study.
Will you participate in the next round?
No, for reasons explained above.