Posted on 08/14/2002 3:28:07 PM PDT by The Raven
Some 20 million people in the United States have tinnitus, a chronic ringing or whooshing in the ears, and about 4 million of them experience such severe symptoms that "they wonder if they're going insane," says Martin Lenhardt, a biomedical engineer at Virginia Commonwealth University. The cause of the ailment is, in essence, a biological computer error. So Lenhardt has found a way to reprogram the brain and make the maddening sounds go away, temporarily at least.
When people lose the ability to hear very high frequencies— whether due to aging, disease, or exposure to loud noise— the neurons in the brain that used to process those sounds start to respond to a lower frequency instead. At the same time, those neurons may also increase how often they fire without any input, leading to phantom ringing. Lenhardt and his colleagues at the Martha Entenmann Tinnitus Research Center in New York City are reprogramming the neurons to proper functioning by exposing them to high-frequency vibrations.
This audio spectrum shows, in yellow, the frequency range of the vibrations used to treat tinnitus. Courtesy of Martin Lenhardt.
The researchers place a quarter-sized piezoelectric disk behind the patients' ears, which sends the vibrations through the skin and into the temporal bone of the skull. Although these motions bypass the middle ear, they stimulate the neurons, which respond if they were once again being exposed to high-pitch sounds coming from the ear itself. Lenhardt uses music that has been modulated to high frequencies to guide the action of the disk, so that its vibrations have a pattern. "We wanted a rhythmic source, that wasn't too boring," says Lenhardt. Pulsed sound is also a better neural stimulator than steady sound, he says: "We think it has to pulse a little bit to be effective, or you're not paying attention to it." After receiving two months of half-hour-long vibration sessions, conducted twice a week, most of the patients in a small pilot study said their tinnitus had vanished. Symptoms returned within two weeks, however, so Lenhardt expects that repeated sonic treatments will be needed to keep the neurons properly programmed. "But if you can do it in a non-invasive way and only need a little bit of time, this could be a real breakthrough for people who just go crazy with tinnitus," he says. His group has just received FDA approval for the device, called UltraQuiet.
Lenhardt and his colleagues are also working on Tactaid, a complimentary treatment that could relieve tinnitus symptoms immediately but that wouldn't provide long-term relief. Tactaid uses a very low-frequency vibrating disk to stimulate the muscles around the ear. In about a third of tinnitus cases, the symptoms seem to be influenced by a link between the brain's auditory system and the somatosensory system, which is involved in movement and automatic reactions. This connection makes a certain amount of sense: The phantom ringing of tinnitus is much like a type of phantom limb phenomenon, whereby a person can feel that his arm is moving, even when it is not, if the correct part of the brain is stimulated. Hearing is connected to the somatosensory system because some muscular movement occurs when we hear -- something that is more obvious in animals such as cats and dogs that can swivel their ears as they listen.
Tactaid's low-frequency vibrations stimulate the muscles around the ear, creating a signal that travels through the somatosensory pathways. Some of these pathways, in turn, connect to the cochlear nucleus, the part of the brainstem that is first to process sounds. The vibratory signal inhibits the cochlear nucleus, causing a cascade of neural reactions further up in the brain, which ultimately blocks the nerve impulses that people hear as phantom ringing. But as soon as the muscle vibration stops, the tinnitus comes back. Thus Tactaid is a bit like an aspirin for tinnitus, giving spot relief when the ringing is severe but not addressing the cause of the pain. The hope, Lenhardt says, is that Tactaid and UltraQuiet will address both halves of the problem, removing the symptoms right away while reprogramming the neurons in a way that will permanently cancel the ringing.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RELATED WEB SITES: "Cured of the Rings." "Vibrotactile suppression of tinnitus." Martin L. Lenhardt. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol 111, No 5, Pt 2, May 2002. Presented at the 143rd meeting in Pittsburgh, June 3-7, 2002. See http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.apr02/asa177.html.
"High-Frequency Sound Treatment of Tinnitus" by Martin L. Lenhardt, Douglas G. Richards, Alan G. Madsen, Abraham Shulman, Barbara A. Goldstein, and Robert Guinta is at www.acoustics.org/press/142nd/lenhardt.html.
See more at Lenhardt's Web page: www.tinnitus.vcu.edu.
WoW! That's amazing. If they can reprogram the brain do do this, maybe they can reprogram the brain to help people with addictions, or autistic children and maybe they can even reprogram the brain to treat obesity. IF they get real good maybe they can reprogram the brain of liberals. LOL I suppose that's too much to hope for. ;o)
I read through the whole thread before I noticed that it was 5 years old. I searched for current info on this scientist and found this site:
http://www.tinnitus.vcu.edu/Pages/Main.html
There is a commercial site link I’m going to check it out now. It would be great it this actually worked.
This is bull. Another mountebank at work.
I just saw my opthomologist for my yearly exam and he told me they can get rid of floaters now. If they really bother you they can go into the eye and aspirate them.
Really!?!
I will look into it. They drive me batty, and they just keep getting worse.
Thanks for the tip.
Yes. He told me because I have floaters and everytime he dialates my eyes he can see them. I think they bother him worse than they do me. LOL
I will look into it. They drive me batty, and they just keep getting worse.
If your own opthomologist doesn't know about it yet, you might have to go to the medical school/county hospital to get it done. Mine is not with them now, but he used to be a professor at the university hospital. He has since started the largest opthomologist group in NM. They have offices in several cities around the state. I just saw him a week and a half ago and I don't go back for another year, or I would ask him more. He is a retina specialist.
Thanks for the tip.
You're welcome. :o) If you are not able to find anyone that knows about it, let me know and I will contact him and ask him about the procedure again. I'm sure he can put you in touch with someone in your area that does it. If not, you might have to make an appointment to go see him because I KNOW he does it.
Thank you so much! I don’t much utilize the medical “industry” (white-coat phobia) but if I could just be rid of the nasty things it would be a huge blessing.
I’ll check around. I’m in the SF Bay Area, so even it they don’t have it here at the beach, I’m betting there will be someone in the greater Bay Area.
Well worth looking into. If I come up with zero, I’ll let you know.
You’re a real pal!
I know what you mean. Mine have never really bothered me, but now that I'm thinking about it, it would be nice to get rid of them.
I’ll check around. I’m in the SF Bay Area, so even it they don’t have it here at the beach, I’m betting there will be someone in the greater Bay Area.
I'm sure you're right. CA is much more advanced than NM is. We're usually a decade behind CA. LOL
Well worth looking into. If I come up with zero, I’ll let you know.
Please do. I'll be interested to see what you come up with. To be honest, I never even asked him for details about it, because I had bigger fish to fry at the time he told me. < After > he told me that my eyes were actually better, I didn't think to follow up with the floaters issue. I was just happy to get good news. :o)
You’re a real pal!
Thanks! I hope it works out for you. Let me know IF or when you have the procedure done, and I'll be praying for you. They gave me two shots right in the eye once and they honestly didn't hurt, so I'm hopeful that this procedure won't hurt either.
Yes! Especially asprin. I’ve never had it drown out anything I wanted to hear and when I hear something particularly interesting that gets me thinking it seems to disappear. That’s why it’s usually there just before falling to sleep cause there’s nothing to think about except SEX!!! Ha Ha Ha!!! (of course that might be just the therapy to make it disappear more often and during hard times... Hmmmmmmmm)
I, dad, and grandpa had it, i recall reading that it is hereditary.
cool.
Mine are minor enough still I don’t think I would go that route, but if it gets bad enough, I would consider it.
Some have AWFUL floaters. I really can’t imagine how awful it would be....as bad as the ear ringing.
I am not sure that I want to give up my nonexistent crickets. After all these years, I can’t imagine what I would do if the room were ever completely quiet. That might drive me mad.
Aspirin and other NSAIDs can worsen tinnitus even in regular doses, but Tylenol (acetaminophen) is not usually a problem.
What I find interesting is the genetic links to the phones ringing or sea shell roaring in our ears.
Both of my parents had this syndrome as well as my maternal Grandfather, and they had high BP. One time my mother said her ringing was worse and she wasn’t getting a cold or another ear infection, (more on this later). Since she was 2000 miles away, I called up my sister and told her to check on Mom re not taking her BP meds. Sure enough, she had stopped taking them for some silly reason, and her BP was really high.
Mom used to get the ringing before she got a cold or an ear infection. Both of our grandkids tell their parents that they are hearing a phone ringing about 12 hours before they get a new bout of Otitis Media/ear infection. Our DIL takes them to the Peds, who don’t argue with her now. They check the kids ears and temps and start them on antibiotics. Within 1-2 days, the ringing is gone and any temp drops within a day.
One of the peds has told my DIL that when the kids have the triad of symptons:
1. ringing in the ears,
2. A temp
3. Wanting to go to sleep and hibernate (this is from PaPa) until the fever goes away.
That she doesn’t have to seen the doctors, just phone in for the antibiotic rx. If she is uncomfortable with that, to come into the office and have one of the RN’s check the temp and the ears before an antibiotic rx is phoned in.
Amazing and intensely interesting! I’ve hear that asprin and antibiotics can both make the ringing worse. Don’t know if its true, or not.
Higher doses of aspirin and NSAIDs can cause the ringing or increase the loudness of it with some people.
savin’ this one. Thanks
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