Hearing Loss & Tinnitus... Why Some Have Hearing Loss and Others Don't?

[Mario martz]

Anyone have an idea why some people experience a significant hearing loss and have no tinnitus at all?

And why some have experience tinnitus because of a little hearing loss?

Doesn't make sense to me...

 

[Ed209]

I think the short answer is no one knows.

 

[Poyraz]

I think scientist know it now but they do not bother to explain it to us.

 

[linearb]

probably for similar reasons as to why three people can all have their right hand amputated, and only one of them develops phantom limb pain.

For genetic, environmental and maybe psychological reasons, different brains plasticize input loss and changes differently. Some people's brains handle signal loss by becoming less active, other people's brains are prone to hyperactivity instead. If there's a loss of activity you just hear less in general, and if there's hyperactivity along those pathways then you're going to have phantom percepts.

I think scientist know it now but they do not bother to explain it to us.

If you spend enough time trying to communicate with audiologists and neurologists, you can find people who will be happy to explain their theories and understanding. In my experience lots of scientists are excited to find regular citizens with a personal stake in their work.

Medical doctors can be a lot harder to pin down, heh.

 

[Bobby B]

I think that slow hearing loss spread over the years and evenly in both ears and over more frequencies will let the brain adapt better and produce no tinnitus

A sudden hearing loss in one ear even mild will be worse

And then it's high frequencies , above what is tested or even between the tested frequencies so how can one be sure that there is no loss
Even more , once you have T then hearing results close to the T frequncy will be very unstable and show great variations every few seconds so it's hard to test accurately
That's what my ENT told me - and we did spent time on the machine I saw for myself how the results were all over the place for the same frequncy
My ENT gets often people with t caused by stress at office work only - no trauma at all- who have no actual hearing loss and perfect ears but the audio gram will show hearing loss like -25db as the brain has issues hearing the frequencies due to T

 

[attheedgeofscience]

The work of Prof. Tzounopoulos describing the involvement of the HCN channels and restoration of Kv-channels after noise exposure, along with Prof. Rauschecker's work on a gating mechanism, provide clues as to why tinnitus develops and persists even with little to no hearing loss by audiometric assessment.

For those interested, I have shared the full text research documents for both authors "somewhere" on TinnitusTalk.

 

[Christokp]

Why is that when some people have hearing loss they do not get tinnitus? I don't understand this.

 

[Tinker Bell]

According to ENTs that I have spoken with, the reasoning could possibly be whether the hearing loss occurred suddenly or slowly over time (allowing the brain time to adapt). There are obviously cases of sudden hearing loss without tinnitus or a lifetime of loud noise exposure that eventually leads to tinnitus, but again the brain is likely key.