Restoration of hair cells may have knock-on effects for tinnitus.
If tinnitus is a maladaptive neuroplasticity (your brain "needs" to hear something so if it can't because you're deaf at that frequency it'll invent things for you to hear instead) that makes sense to model as some stable limit cycle of a nonlinear system -- which is one of the leading hypotheses for tinnitus right now -- then it's not totally implausible that restoration of function would change your tinnitus percepts.
It's not clear that it'd help, but I'm pretty confident that if we can restore hair cell function, someone's going to try.
Yes -- although there are lots of folks with hearing loss who don't have tinnitus. There must be more to the story than just the ghost ringing that you're talking about. But I do think that the hypothesis you quote makes intuitive sense, at least as much as these hypercomplex things can be intuitive.
As you say people can lose hearing without tinnitus. Having mild tinnitus myself and looked up how the hearing system works, I think the lead suspect must be the gizmo that converts the mechanical movement of sound waves into the ion level changes of neural impulses. It looks a bit like a tube that is opened or closed a little by movement of the hair attached to it, letting K+ ions through the hole or not. Damage to that could let ions go through when there is no actual movement of the hair.
It's kind of remarkable the things work as well as they do given the difference between 0db where you can just hear and 110db or so where it breaks is a 300,000x or so difference in amplitude.
Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of you middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times. Some people experience immediate relief with this method. Repeat several times a day for as long as necessary to reduce tinnitus.
~ Dr. Jan Strydom, of A2Z of Health, Beauty and Fitness.org.
I don't have a medical degree, but i do have mild tinnitus, and what i've found works the best for me is to simply stop paying attention to it, which is of course harder than it seems.
Most days i don't even notice it, until i notice the absence of it, which will promptly make it "return", or like now when i'm reading an article about it, and i'm very aware of it.
I then simply try to ignore it the best i can, and with a little practice you can "make it go away" to the point where you're not noticing it anymore. Don't ignore it by thinking of it, as this will surely make you aware of it. Ignore it by simply not thinking about it.
And as with all things you pick up on the internet, YMMV.
Have tried this a couple of times with zero relief unfortunately. I have conductive hearing loss due to otosclerosis (plaque buildup on stapes) so that might be why it doesn't work for me.
I'm fairly certain this is a case-by-case kind of "remedy". A friend of mine had terrible tinnitus and this did not help him at all. I wonder if this has something to do with bone structure or, perhaps, depends on the severity of the condition. Still, it's solid advice that should be spread wide in case it helps some people.
Same here. My hearing is getting worse and I might have an operation in a few month. Luckily only one side is affected (for now, chances are not good it remains that way)
I can anecdotally confirm this. When my tinnitus starts up, I do this immediately. Like, stop whatever I'm doing immediately (obviously not driving), and it does give me some relief. It's really weird hearing quiet afterwards, though.
Just tried this for the first time and my mild tinnitus (usually only notice it when people bring up tinnitus or after a long flight) just got a bit quiter! Very interesting!
Note: by the time I finished writing this the ringing was back at "full" volume.
I’m affected as well, noise damage. Had seen the papers coming out a while ago and desperately waiting for something that becomes available “for the masses”.
Do you know of any existing self-treatment (e.g. an app that applies a notch filter on acting as a Spotify client) or do you happen to have any reference to more specific treatments that might be available on the market?
There are sites that let you find and create a proper notch filter for free. You can then play them on loop in iTunes at your desk. Or on speakers as you sleep.
I believe this is the only research based treatment for tinnitus right now.
I also have it from too many raves. I can’t wear headphones anymore including AirPods.
Notch filters work some but healthy living has a big effect for me. Enough sleep, exercise, easy on intoxicants etc.
But just reading about and thinking about it is allowing me to hear something I normally tune out okay. It is sad what I’ve done to my hearing though. I wish there was a “cure.”
There are many kinds of tinnitus, and I had some coming on last year from too many concerts and power tools. But, after a few months of wearing an A.L.F. appliance for sleep apnea, my TMJ opened up a bit and relieved some of the pressure on my skull, and most of my tinnitus went away. I would say the "volume" of it is less than 1/4 what it was, and low enough that I wouldn't say I have it now.
So it's not a guaranteed fix, but I highly recommend talking to a TMJ specialist about your tinnitus and see if there is anything they can do. I think there also may be connections with blood pressure, vitamins/minerals, hydration, etc that could affect programmers sitting in chairs all day. Hope this helps, YMMV.
I have a similar thing. For me it is exacerbated by sinus pressure.
Sinus care, exercise, even losing weight all have positive effects on my perception of tinnitus. At its worse I could hear it over the sound of 2 stroke marine diesel engine (around 60dB ambient), its currently around 20dB.
I also have TMJ, I'll look into getting a specialist. Thanks for the tip!
Both of the prior posters are correct from my reading. You should also note that the comorbidity between sensorineural hearing loss and tinnitus is very high, again strongly suggesting that a subgroup will receive significant benefit if the hearing loss is fixed. In my experience, I would also recommend you seek out an ENT or audiologist that will do high frequency hearing testing (8 KHz to 16 KHz or higher). This is not standard in hearing tests, which max out at 8KHz because that is the functional range of speech and most sounds that affect daily life for humans, but loss of frequencies above that can often be present with tinnitus.
Yeah, I was diagnosed with very early stages of high frequency hearing loss after noticing tinnitus-like symptoms earlier this year. The setup was much more elaborate than the standard hearing tests I have done in the past.
So... okay, I did not want to go public at first and emailed privately, but since there are others, and why not:
I too had tinnitus for a long time and it all went away after chelation treatment against chronic mercury poisoning from amalgam fillings after being lucky that it was diagnosed (I had to actively search for a rare researcher/university clinic doctor specialist, nearly no chance with normal doctors). See my post history, I mention it a few times. I could write a few more pages about it all but in this format I'll leave it at that, people with the problem can decide for themselves if this is relevant for them. I was reluctant to post because I know a lot - most? - people don't take low-dose heavy metal poisonings seriously at all. I had people wanting to buy an espresso machine off of me despite me having revealed that I planned to scrap it because the water coming out of it had twice the official limit for lead in it (and the medical limit is zero so any lead would have been bad). Because "how bad can it be, such a tiny amount sure does not matter".
By the way, my tinnitus went away within year one of chelation treatment. However, after almost a decade (of continued occasional chelation because it still helped) I had a lot of activity all of sudden for a few weeks around both ears. For the last decade I had shifting activity patterns in various areas, so that wasn't a surprise, I had expected something like that since that was a major impacted area. For weeks I could not listen to music and definitely not use a headset. Something was going on there and it wanted quiet.. Anyway, long story short - I can now hear much better than a decade ago! I first noticed because I've had the exact same MP3 player with the exact same songs for well over a decade, and the same in-ear headset for just as long. Suddenly I had to turn the (numerically adjusted) volume much farther down, into regions where previously I could not hear a thing apart from "music plays". Now I have to play everything on about 10-20% less volume than before, and it all happened exactly after those weeks of activity (where I even had to go to a doctor to get the ears cleaned, there was way more ear wax than usual during that time).
GP appears to have diagnosed himself with chronic metal poisoning, and doctor-shopped until he found a physician willing to make his self-diagnosis official and prescribe all the oral chelators he convinced himself he needed a priori.
Chronic heavy metal toxicity is a subject rife with quackery and pseudoscience, especially when people start talking about chronic poisoning undetectable by conventional medicine. It's best to be careful whose story you believe. It's a hot button issue for me as a person "on the spectrum" because ill-informed parents subject their kids to Cutler protocol and other fringe chelation therapies under the belief that they're "curing" their kids of autism, and causing more health problems than they fix (chelators are themselves pretty toxic!)
Here are some resources about metal toxicity pseudoscience:
I had blood and urine and hair with high mercury levels - but according to you remote comment diagnosing "specialist" I'm a psycho.
Also, my jaw was in a bad state - a needle meant for mucosa injection went right deep in - in exactly all the places where I had had amalgam fillings. Nothing ever showed up in x-ray - which is normal, bone damage shows up in x-ray only when it's extreme (although a needle easily penetrating bone already is quite extreme). The doctor injected DMPS (chelator), the jaw healed.
Also, an double-size right-side thyroid with a nodule, stable for 2.5 decades, within half a year completely disappeared to the great amazement of my endocrinologist who had recommended surgery. There was lots of activity in the tissue around that area in my neck starting after I got chelation.
Warts on my feet, getting more and more numerous over the decades, completely gone.
Winter depression, psoriasis, colds (before diagnosis lasting the entire winter, getting longer and longer), eye issues, comprehension issues, digestion was bad and now is wonderful, - a long list of stuff JUST GONE NOW.
Look in a mirror for who is the quack, not to mention that with your accusation and remote diagnosis you are being quite an asshole.
The doctor I'm seeing is a researcher at a university clinic and always talks in "studies" and is very careful, never making any promises, always cautious with recommendations, preferring to do as little as possible. When I went there he said I must have something else, the levels of mercury found justify chelation treatment but are not high enough to explain all my problems. He never found anything else and improvement was far exceeding expectations. With chronic poisoning most of the stuff is hidden and comes out slowly, so yes, lab measurements usually cannot show it, I was "lucky" I had such highly elevated values. The doctor also makes no money - the university clinic charges a tiny bit (Germany, not US, it's next to nothing because there is nothing expensive, no medical imaging, just a few cheap lab tests, the chelators, DMPS and DMSA, some minor additions, are extra but inexpensive).
> I was hoping to read that it might also help people like myself who suffer from tinnitus. Sadly, no.
It depends, I have tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss. It's not at the point where I need hearing aids, but anecdotally a friend of mine who got hearing aids reported that his tinnitus goes away when using them.
Even though it wasn't mentioned in the article, a lot of researchers in this field believe that a cure for hearing loss will take care of tinnitus and hyperacusis too, at least for a patient subgroup. There's tinnitus caused by muscle tension/dysfunction (?) which is of an entirely different etiology apparently, but the good news is that that kind seems more treatable than the kind caused by permanent hearing dysfunction.
It's kinda funny. I really enjoy my tinnitus. The pulsing ring in my left ear merges with the buzzing in my right and it "Sounds like Quiet" to me. Maybe because I've had it since I was a baby I'm more adapted to it. Then again I don't think mine is nearly as bad as some people's.
Would those who regained hearing have tinnitus? I mean, in theory, wouldn't you be able to recover from tinnitus if you made yourself deaf and ate the proteins. Maybe stupid question, but why not?
Some tinnitus is comorbid with hearing loss, but some isn't. If you have hearing loss and tinnitus, it's possible that improving the hearing loss would also reduce or eliminate the tinnitus, as they would appear to be related. If your tinnitus is unrelated to hearing loss though, it seems to me unlikely that giving yourself and then curing hearing loss would have an effect. (Not to rule it out completely, given that the causes of tinnitus are not well understood.)
Still, if it can restore hearing to the deaf, this is a good thing.