Take Part in the COMIT'ID Study

[Tinnitus Talk]

Register for the COMIT'ID Study

Tell researchers what matters to you.

Have your say and influence future research.

Your opinion will help guide the research of tomorrow.


What is the COMIT'ID Study?

COMIT'ID is an abbreviation of Core Outcome Measures in Tinnitus – International Delphi. The study aims to improve future tinnitus research by standardising what is measured when treatments are tested. To do this we will collect the views of members of the public with tinnitus and people who have a professional interest in tinnitus in order to understand what 'aspects' of tinnitus (also known as outcomes) are important to be measured.

If you want to have your say and wish to take part you will be asked to complete an online survey with 3 rounds of questions, each taking up to 60 minutes to complete. These rounds will be sent to you, one after the other, over a period of 5 months. You will then have the opportunity to participate in a final meeting to discuss the survey results.


Who is organizing the study?

The study team who will be running this project are based at the NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit. Deb Hall, Kathryn Fackrell and Harriet Smith make up the core management team.

 

[RonnieCarzatto]

Do you have to be a UK citizen to take part?

 

[Markku]

Do you have to be a UK citizen to take part?

No need to be UK citizen.

 

[Candy]

Thanks, have registered my interest.

 

[grate_biff]

Me too!

 

[Tinnitus Talk]

Thanks everyone so far!

Results speak for themselves:

 

[Frédéric]

I bumped up this thread to see more participants but maybe it is too late.

 

[Valentin]

I have also sent en email to register to the study, let's see if it'll pass through their spam filter.

 

[Samir]

I have done part two of this study. Awaiting part three.

 

[Samir]

I have done part three yesterday. Don't mean to brag, but I got a nice little "Certificate of Completion".

 

[Steve]

The sound based study took place today for the COMIT'ID project. I was in the group and voted along with 18 other participants on what we believed were the most important outcome measures for tinnitus trials on sound therapy interventions.

I'm happy to say that we reached a consensus on 5 things. I can't say what they are because it could have a bias on the next group (drug based treatments) but I can say that the goal was to agree on up to 6 measures.

There was a very good cross section of patients, clinicians, researchers and industry. A lot of the discussions we had are similar to many of those found on Tinnitus Talk and other forums, we all have ideas on what really matters and what makes a treatment a success. It was all incredibly constructive, a lot of debate and input from every person into the final decision.

The next steps will be to engage the people who do the research, get a consensus across all groups and then the team will be looking at existing questionnaires that can assess the outcomes, or developing new ones.

It isn't overnight work but it is very important work.

 

[Frédéric]

Out of curiosity, the need for an international standard is not new:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3897200/

 

[Greg Sacramento]

@Frédéric In addition to direction of approach in your link, researchers may have few other choices than to focus on what's in this link and other sources found on the right in Recent Activity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5258692/

For somatic tinnitus, some added approaches would be needed. Underlying conditions beyond suspect ETD. ear wax, disease/other conditions etc; as needed to lead to the assessment of dental occlusion in relationship to the posture of the neck. The jaw and neck is the motor system that causes nerves to react to acoustic pathways. So far, I have found 132 causes of somatic tinnitus, most relate to spine - upper and lower, muscle tension, jaw and mouth and posture. Trying to flowchart causes with responsible professional treatments will be difficult, but I plan to give it a shot.

The neck - So many conditions. Maybe to top of that list would be the sternocleidomastoid pulling on neck vertebrae and the mastoid near the ear.

If the temporomandibular joint isn't working property then the neck may be out of alignment. This would need to be addressed.

This link doesn't like to stay active: Place in browser - Wikipedia temporomandibular joint dysfunction
This is a valuable source of information among all the articles of the jaw.

 

[Steve]

Out of curiosity, the need for an international standard is not new:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3897200/

I believe this was the seed work for the COMIT'ID project.

From this piece of work it progressed and became a part of the TINNET group that received EU funding. It takes an awfully long time for these things to progress unfortunately - well a long time for those of us with tinnitus anyway.

 

[Frédéric]

I found the attached file today, I don't think it has been already posted.

The COMiT'ID Study: Developing Core Outcome Domains Sets for Clinical Trials of Sound-, Psychology-, and PharmacologyBased Interventions for Chronic Subjective Tinnitus in Adults

 

[Frédéric]

Message from Professor Deborah HALL received today.

EDIT: I checked quickly and I think the link below provides the same article than the one from the attached file. So sorry nothing new.

Dear tinnitus colleagues,

I'm delighted to let you know that at long last the main findings from the COMiT'ID study are now published!!

The recommendations are freely available via this link and we'd be happy for you to share this with colleagues and friends to spread the news

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2331216518814384

This article is an academic paper aimed at the professional community. It focuses on reporting the main findings from the online Delphi survey and the follow-up consensus meetings. The COMiT team hope that these findings will be useful to the tinnitus community in designing clinical trials that seek to provide confirmatory evidence for whether or not a tinnitus treatment has worked.

There's another publication in the pipeline which provides supporting evidence for the three different sets of outcomes according to the intervention…. This should be out soon.

…… And Alice is working on a final paper which describes the discussions that were had around what each of the outcomes actually mean. This will be important for the next step which is to work out whether any of the existing measurement instruments might be suitable for quantifying each of the outcomes that are in the core sets.


Kind regards to you all and thanks again for your participation in the COMiT'ID study.

Prof Deborah Hall
Professor of Hearing Sciences, University of Nottingham
Research area lead for Outcomes in clinical trials, Hearing theme NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre​

 

[Frédéric]

New article released today about this study.

One Size Does Not Fill: Developing Common Standards for Outcomes in Early-Phase Clinical Trials of Sound-, Psychology-, and Pharmacology-Based Interventions for Chronic Subjective Tinnitus in Adults

 

[Frédéric]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378595518304659

Standardized questions in English for estimating tinnitus prevalence and severity, hearing difficulty and usage of healthcare resources, and their translation into 11 European languages

Highlights

• We provide standardized questions on tinnitus and hearing difficulty.
• Good practice for translation and cross-cultural adaptation were implemented.
• Survey questions and response options are proposed in 12 languages.