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.
The problem is that it's not the eardrum, it's caused by damage to the microscopic hairs in the cochlea.
Sometimes in the fall we get a lot of crickets around are house and it drives her nuts when we go to bed. I can't even hear them because my tinnitis masks it.
This treatment is exciting. (BTW, I know it's been a while but it sure is good to have Rush back to normal.)
If you've got high blood pressure and having any kind of eye symptoms you really ought to go in for a glaucoma test. If you catch that early enough it can be treated.
I used to get them about 4 or 5 times a week, in the late afternoon, when I was working long days during the summer. - Doctors seemed to know less than nothing about them, and nothing they prescribed helped, and much of it made it worse.
About 5 years ago I had a long conversation with an 'alternative' physician that my wife was seeing, and he proved to me that it was caused by deep fluctuations in blood sugar levels, thus the tendency toward late afternoon occurances. - After some changes in my eating, and working habits, including drinking copious amounts of fresh orange and carrot juice, and increasing meat consumption, they are gone.
I'd like to say the same about the tinnitis, but no help there.
Hmmm, haven't tried that one, but I had pretty good luck with Fiorinal myself. When I was in high school, I started getting very odd migraines from time to time, that I've had ever since. It's odd because it's really only a very mild headache, with no real nausea, but I totally lose any peripheral vision, with massive blind spots even right in front of me. It's the weirdest thing - I can be looking at a chair up against a wall, and see the wall, but not the chair. And it's a total pain in the butt, even though it doesn't hurt all that much - can't read, can't work, can't drive.
Doctor put me on Tylenol #3 to start (after rounds and rounds of vision checks, CAT scans, the works), but that was no improvement for me - I'd see just fine, but the codeine knocked me on my butt anyway, so I still wasn't getting anything done ;)
A couple of weeks ago my son took me fly fising in his new boat. After we got home we were cleaning out and off his boat, and a cricket hopped out from under the boat and hopped into a shed. I commented that I hadn't heard the crickets this summer.
My wife gave me one of those funny grins. After dinner our son returned to his home. I asked why her funny grin re my comment about not hearing the crickets this summer.
She smiled and said they have been singing on every warm evening since the 4th of July. I just couldn't hear them due to my tinnitus.
What is interesting we have some owls who live in the older oak trees around us. At early morning before dawn they like to perch on the chimney of the fireplace in our bedroom. If our bedroom windows are open, I hear them. My wife can't hear them.
One morning the owls were so loud they woke me up and I couldn't go back to sleep. My wife thought I was having hoot halucinations. I made her get out of bed. We sneaked out and into the driveway by the bedroom. I shined my flashlight on the chimney and 5 owls were sitting on it hooting. She still could not hear the hooting. When they took off they screetched and she heard that.
When I get the sparklies, they start out as a pinprick of color that grows outward in a ring of sparkling colors, and everything inside the ring is dulled and fuzzy. Can see shapes, kinda, but can't read. After maybe 45 minutes it fades back to normal.
Has anyone checked into the claims made in the original post?
This is a high frequency BUMP!
The original link to this article in Discover Magazine appears to have been changed. I did find it, or one similar to it, here....
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/sep/breakcured/?searchterm=tinnitus
Yep-—that was 5 years ago....
YES!
I developed tinnitus a couple years ago. At first it was trying to drive me batty. It was constant and bothersome. The specialists told me there wasn’t much that could be done. If the noise interfered with hearing conversations a hearing aid might possibly help.
I’ve since learned to put up with it. It’s not as bad now as it was - it’s always there, but sometimes barely noticeable.
I can understand how some people would be driven to the edge. If mine was loud all the time I’d be a full scale nutcase.
I have had the sea shell noise all my life too. I am accustomed to it but sometimes its louder than other times. Allergy and stopped up eustation (sp?)tubes I think.
For some reason gorush sent me a Freepmail re this old thread on the ringing in the ears. That was timely as I have some ringing in my ears this morning.
A little update on the ringing. The pharmacy company that provides our Rxes made a generic substitution for my Vasotec about a year ago.
The ringing in my ears came back with a roar in the evening and for a couple of hours in the morning. I bought one of the personal electronic bp monitoring units, and my BP was high during these ringing spells. My wife, an office RN, bought her gear home to check me, and she confirmed that my BP was up for a few hours in the morning before and after the morning generic Vasotec and the same with the 6-6:30 pm generic.
My doctor wrote a Do Not Substitute rx, and I had a go around with one of the pharmacists and got the real Vasotec. After a week or so on the real stuff, the ringing went back to minimal ringing a little before and after I took the Vasotec. Then it would go away for the rest of the day.
Merck changed the look of the Vasotec Tablets and maybe the fillers. The ringing has basically gone away except when I wait more than 12 hours between doses with the new tablets.
Last night we met friends for dinner at 5:30 pm. I took my Vasotec at 5 pm, normal dosing is between 6 and 6:30 pm. This morning I got up at 5:30 am, and by 6 am the ringing had started. I took my morning dose of Vasotec at 6:30 am, and the ring is going away 15 minutes later.
So medication for HBP and... even as a precurser to getting a cold or virus caused illness... WOW! I was told all kinds of stuff like it is caused by consuming to much Aspertame sweetner like what is found in the gallons of Diet Pepsi I used to drink like a fiend. Now it's in the gallons of Lipton Diet Green Tea that I drink.
I have to admit that when I switched to CountryTime Lemonade for a summer in '04, it seemed to lessen just a little, but the acid in that stuff started to wreck the enamel on my teeth, so now I'm on the bottled green tea. I can't stand to drink just plain tasteless water for some stupid reason.
I've often thought the condition was completely psychosomatic as it is NOT a "noise" as no one else can ever hear it... just you! So it's truly "all in your head!" However, I'm really drawn to your HBP/chemical causes and even the colds and virus causes as the most logical and likely. Thanks for sharing with me and thanks to gorush, too!!!
I've read that that high pitched tone you hear is one of the 40,000 nerve cells in your inner dying. I get them, too.
I’ve had tinnitus since my early 20’s. When it first appeared it was really disturbing, but after 30 years, it’s just normal background noise. Very unpleasant, something like a high-pitched whistle somewhere in the distance that never stops. I’d love to get rid of it, but it doesn’t ruin my life.
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