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.
I do hope this is the breakthrough it appears to be. There are a lot of good people out there with this terrible affliction.
Tinnitus is a known correspondent to schizophrenia. Look for the question on your favorite multi-phasic personality inventory.
Now if you will excuse me, I think I hear the phone ringing.
Seriously, tinnitus is a miserable disease to be inflicted with.
Word to the wise - turn down the volume and use ear protection around loud noises.
Good point. When I was a young man, I worked in a recording studio. I was constantly monitoring loud sounds, and it was made worse by cranking my Walkman back and forth from work. It got so bad, I had to cover my ears whenever the subway train would apply its breaks in the station.
About once a week, I still get a high pitched tone (close to sinusoidal) in either one of my ears that lasts about 5 seconds - fade in/fade out. I guess I'm lucky.
Maddening, indeed.
It gets so loud at times my wife swears she can hear it when she puts her ear to mine! This procedeure might be what I've been looking for all these years...(moderate amounts of brandy seem to help...LOL!)
LOL! I was going to make some joke about Gore having this, but well, too many FReepers have it. So there must be some benefit. Perhaps sound is too distracting, while reading brings one closer to the truth? FReegards....
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