Excellent feedback
@Autumnly !
- Project 12 (Marta Partyka) hosted by Paris-Lodron University Salzburg: "Ongoing modulatory effects of transcranial electric stimulation on induced brain activity in persons with normal hearing and tinnitus"
- Project 13 (Stefan Schoisswohl) hosted by the University of Regensburg: "Activate and fire: Pairing auditory stimulation with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulationfor the treatment of tinnitus"
- Project 14 (Shikha Spencer) hosted by Medical University Lodz: "Optimizating extra-cochlear electrical stimulations in tinnitus treatment"
- Project 15 (Vinay Parameshwarappa) hosted by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Marseille: "Developing new strategies of cochlear electric stimulation to suppress tinnitus"
Great, we'll keep that in mind. Maybe we can interview those students when we attend the next ESIT meeting.
- How can we as people with tinnitus help ESIT?
- Is it one of ESIT's goals to create a medical treatment or are they more focused on generally learning more about tinnitus? On their homepage it says "They will develop new treatment solutions for tinnitus" but that could also mean new CBT techniques.
- When and where will the studies by the four people mentioned above take place and when can we expect results?
I don't want to speak on behalf of the ESIT researchers, so we should definitely put these questions to them as well, but I can already make some informed guesses as to what the answers might be:
#1 Your first question is a really interesting one. I think one of the issues here is how do we keep this new generation of researchers interested in a long-term tinnitus career? There is a risk that after their PhD they'll disappear to work on other topics. Perhaps closer relations with patients and seeing how their work can have an impact on people's lives might make a difference. Some of the students already work directly with patients, but when you're doing lab research or analysing big data this is of course not the case. I don't have any ready made solutions though, just random thoughts for now
#2 I think ESIT is being relatively modest about their aims. They don't want to overpromise, and state something like "we will find the cure" because that's likely to lead to disappointment. Nobody can predict at this point how close they might get to that. In terms of CBT and such, only one of the 15 PhD projects is focussed on that. Since their whole 'spiel' is about interdisciplinarity, and getting tinnitus researchers from different fields to work more closely together, I do think CBT has a place in this. Ideally - though I cannot judge to what extent this is actually happening - we would see cross-pollenation between CBT and neuroscience for instance, or between animal and human auditory studies, etc.
Their premise is that the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, so you have to take all approaches to studying tinnitus into account, including CBT, and somehow tie them all together. Easier said than done of course, and again I cannot judge to what extent this is really happening. I'm thinking it would be interesting to hear more about how this interdisciplinarity actually works in practice, and get some real examples.
#3 All the PhD students are about half-way through their 3 year PhD programs, so I guess we should expect most of the results to be published in 1.5 years or so, if all goes well? (But of course it doesn't always go as planned.)
Hope that helps, but as I said, we'll definitely discuss directly with the ESIT folks as well.
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