If you only gain 10 dB at 8 kHz, you aren't going to feel any improvement.
Heck 10 dB at any frequency and you aren't going to feel or hear any improvement.
Same for tinnitus. I doubt any small improvement will get rid of it.
We are all just guessing, but I'm pretty sure you need to get back to perfect hearing once you have tinnitus for it to go away. People get tinnitus with as little as 10 dB loss. Once you have it, and you know you have it, I'm pretty sure you need to get back to baseline for it to go away. As for small improvements... It isn't a linear scale where you gain 10 dB of hearing and your tinnitus gets better by that much. There are so many factors that contribute to its loudness.
I'm not sure if his post is good or bad, but we really need to see improvements in the 30 to 50 dB range for FX-322 to help people, or whatever your hearing loss is...
I'm going to dissect your post bit by bit and give my view on what you said.
We know people have tinnitus and no hearing loss and people have hearing loss and no tinnitus. What this tends to indicate is that tinnitus and hearing loss are actually not inherently linked.
Multiple participants in the phase 1 trial noted improvements in tinnitus. However, what we don't know definitively is whether their tinnitus improvement came from improvements in hearing thresholds or from another source such as synaptic recovery. This is due to insufficient testing. Therefore, we still do not have any clarity as to the reason participants had a reduction in tinnitus. Hence it is impossible to determine both what type of hearing improvement is needed and also what level of improvement is needed to improve or eliminate tinnitus.
CI and hearing aid users have had improvement in their tinnitus (and quite significantly too). The generally well established reason is the extra stimulation delivered, particularly to the high frequency range where the overwhelming majority of daily sounds sit.
However, what we do not know is how much extra stimulation is given to people when utilising a hearing aid. Apparently the amount of stimulation delivered at a particular frequency can often be insufficient to theoretically return someone to baseline level. Yet while using a hearing aid, the user has no symptoms of tinnitus. This suggests that it isn't actually necessary to return hearing thresholds to baseline to eliminate tinnitus.
While a 10 dB improvement as indicated in phase 1 results isn't significant, it is meaningful. Also the increase was only shown at a single frequency due to the testing criteria in the inaugural trial. It is very much possible that there was an improvement above 10 dB in the very high frequencies in the initial trial and this is plausible due to the word recognition score test results.
Therefore I very strongly believe that it is near impossible to determine how much hearing improvement is required and also where that improvement specifically needs to be had in order to eliminate tinnitus. Since we have evidence which suggests you can eliminate tinnitus without returning hearing thresholds to baseline, I would hypothesise that the required improvements you mentioned such as returning hearing levels to baseline levels are not actually required to eliminate tinnitus entirely.
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