Hearing Issues (tinnitus sufferers)

[McBrush]

I found this article on ringing in your ears and a possible treatment. Here is the link  http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1372206 and article. After 8 years in the Armd. Corps I now have some hope to stop the ringing. If this is the wrong spot to place this, or if it has been posted already I do apologize.

  Soldiers who deal daily with a constant ringing in their ears received some promising news last week with regard to a possible treatment and cure of the disorder.
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Cpl Bill Gomm/Canadian Forces
As Sergeant Lejla Imamovic makes sure her earplugs are in place, Gunner Chris Ferguson pulls the lanyard on the C3 105mm Howitzer. Sgt. Imamovic and Gnr. Ferguson are with 10 Field Artillery Regiment. This training exercise took place in Shilo, Manitoba last March. Because of their work proximity to such loud equipment, many soldiers suffer from tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears.

In an online edition of Nature, the international journal of science, researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas reported that targeted nerve stimulation could yield a long-term reversal of what is called tinnitus.

Tinnitus is defined as the perception of noises in the ear which correspond to no acoustic signal in the environment.

Military personnel are regularly exposed to loud and sharp noises connected to artillery firing, bombs, mortars, as well as the whining of large engines from airplanes and other equipment.

In a news release issued by the university, researchers Dr. Michael Kilgard, Dr. Navzer Engineer and university-affiliated biotechnology firm MicroTransponder reported that stimulation of the vagus nerve paired with sounds eliminated tinnitus in rats. The nerve is responsible for carrying a wide assortment of signals to and from the brain.

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is currently used in humans for the treatment of epilepsy and depression.

Although statistics related to tinnitus in this country's military are unclear, it's said to be the top service-connected disability of U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to a UT at Dallas news release, the U.S. Veterans Administration spends about $1 billion a year on disability payments for tinnitus.

The Tinnitus Association of Canada estimates there are approximately 360,000 people with the condition in Canada, while the Tinnitus Association in the U.S. said the disorder affects up to 50 million Americans.

"Brain changes in response to nerve damage or cochlear trauma cause irregular neural activity believed to be responsible for many types of chronic pain and tinnitus," Dr. Kilgard, associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas and co-author of the journal article, said in the release.

"Brain changes in response to nerve damage or cochlear trauma cause irregular neural activity believed to be responsible for many types of chronic pain and tinnitus. But when we paired tones with brief pulses of vagus nerve stimulation, we eliminated the physiological and behavioral symptoms of tinnitus in noise-exposed rats."

According to the article, researchers are involved in retraining the brain to ignore the nerve signals that simulate ringing.

With regard to the rats, those involved in the work monitored the laboratory rodents for several weeks after therapy, and the improvements persisted.

"This minimally invasive method of generating neural plasticity allows us to precisely manipulate brain circuits, which cannot be achieved with drugs," said Dr. Engineer, vice president of pre-clinical affairs at MicroTransponder and lead author on the study, said in the release. "Pairing sounds with VNS provides that precision by rewiring damaged circuits and reversing the abnormal activity that generates the phantom sound."

The good news is that the research team is developing parameters for a clinical trial in humans.

The article's authors said the translation from basic science to the clinic has been quite rapid and expressed enthusiasm over the fact that the National Institutes for Health in the U.S. has been supportive of the group's efforts to move this work along faster, in hopes of providing effective treatments to tinnitus patients.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) early in 2010 granted Dr. Kilgard and MicroTransponder $1.7 million to further investigate whether nerve stimulation offers a long-term cure for tinnitus.

The first patient could be treated in Europe by early 2011.

"The initial set of human participants will have the electrodes attached to the left vagus nerve in their neck during a short outpatient procedure. They will come to the clinic Monday through Friday for a few weeks of treatment. At each daily session, they will experience VNS paired with sounds," further noted the UT Dallas news release.

The research article, which will be published in its entirety later this month is, undoubtedly, good news for soldiers and others suffering from tinnitus.

Only time will tell if it's the cure-all people have been waiting for,

Michael Staples covers the military for The Daily Gleaner. He can be reached at staples.michael@dailygleaner.com.

 

[Occam]

More information on the same theory...

Original link

Fighting noise with noise
Pairing tones with electrical stimulation of the brain may reverse the constant ringing caused by exposure to loud sound

[Published 12th January 2011 06:00 PM GMT]

Exposure to deafening noise can be, well, deafening. It can also induce incessant ringing in the ears known as tinnitus. But playing tones while pulsing electrical stimulation to the brain could reverse the condition, according to a study on rats published online today (January 12) in Nature.

The results are "intriguing," said audiologist Richard Tyler of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, who was not involved in the research. "If this is a valid model of noise-induced tinnitus, then you'd expect widespread benefits to all kinds of people."

Tinnitus, which can be induced not just by loud noises, but also head trauma, certain drugs, and even aging, gives sufferers the sensation of ringing in their ears when no such sound actually exists. The sensation is not imagined. The condition has, in fact, been associated with changes to the auditory cortex of the brain, which impact how sounds are processed. Neurons in this region show an increase in neural excitability, more spontaneous activity, more synchronous firing of neurons, and a general reorganization of the auditory map, with different regions of the cortex firing in response to different sound frequencies. Which of these changes are responsible for the symptoms of tinnitus, however, remains unclear.

In an attempt to reverse these neurological changes, neuroscientist Navzer Engineer and other members of Michael Kilgard's lab at the University of Texas at Dallas worked with rats that experienced mild hearing loss after exposure to extreme noise and appeared to exhibit the symptoms of tinnitus. Specifically, the rats didn't respond to a break in background noise of the same frequency as they were presumably hearing in their heads. Correspondingly, the auditory cortices of these rats were more excitable, fired more synchronously and more spontaneously, and were organized differently than the brains of healthy rats -- more neurons were activated by the tinnitus frequency, while fewer responded to other frequencies in their hearing range.

Engineer, now a fulltime employee of MicroTransponder Inc., a medical device development company in Austin, Texas, and the team attached an electrode to the vagus nerve (VN) in the rat's neck. The researchers chose VN because it is relatively easy to access, and its stimulation is already used to treat ailments such as epilepsy and depression, meaning that if successful, the treatment could translate well to the clinic. Furthermore, the VN sends electrical signals to the nucleus basalis, a brain region that is more difficult to access, but which has previously proven capable of inducing changes in the auditory cortex's organization when stimulated simultaneously with sounds. The researchers then stimulated the VN with electrical impulses while playing tones higher or lower than the suspected tinnitus frequency.

The idea is to train the brain respond more to the paired sounds, and as a result, respond less to the tinnitus frequency, Engineer explained. "We're retuning the brain."

Sure enough, the rats exposed to the VN stimulation paired with sounds appeared to recover from their tinnitus, responding once again to the break in the background noise. In addition, many of the neurological changes that resulted from the noise-exposure returned largely to normal: The auditory map was indistinguishable that of non-noise-exposed rats, for example, and the brain became less excitable again, suggesting that these neurological changes may directly influence tinnitus. The synchronous and spontaneous firing of neurons, however, did not correlate with the behavioral changes, suggesting that these measures of tinnitus may not actually be involved in causing the disorder, but further tests are needed to confirm the finding.

"It's very interesting," said neuroscientist Christoph Schreiner of the W.M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. "This is the most explicit demonstration that plasticity" -- changes to brain organization -- "not only is affected, but can be used for the treatment of potential auditory disabilities."

Like all medically-relevant animal studies, the treatment must be tested in people before it can become commercially available. But in this case, there is an additional obstacle: Not everyone is convinced by the animal models of tinnitus. Without comparable human and animal data and without being able to ask the rats whether they have ringing in their ears, "we cannot be sure, as scientists, the animal does in fact have tinnitus," Tyler said.

Furthermore, animal models are unable to explore another key aspect of tinnitus, Schreiner said -- its emotional impact. Depression, anxiety, and concentration issues have all been associated with the disorder, but "the loudness of the tinnitus does not relate to how much the patient is distressed by it," he said. "Some people shrug, no big deal, and others are driven nuts and jump off a bridge." Even if this treatment reduces tinnitus, if it doesn't completely eliminate the sound, it might not be an effective treatment for the emotional problems that often come along with tinnitus.

Still, "this is a good stepping stone," Tyler said. "It's an exciting step forward, and it will be interesting to see what happens with the humans."

N.D. Engineer, et al., "Reversing pathological neural activity using targeted plasticity," Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09656, 2010.

 

[GreenIsGood]

That might explain why my tinnitus -- caused by playing lots of Call Of Duty -- would subside when I listed to soft, steady music, like lounge or new age.

For more info on tinnitus, check out the Canadian Tinnitus Association site ( http://www.kadis.com/ta/tinnitus.htm ) and the American Tinnitus Association ( http://www.ata.org ). The ATA also publishes a newsletter. I just saw a stack of past issues of the newsletter at Vancouver's downtown library on the 4th floor.

 

[Journeyman]

That might explain why my tinnitus....would subside when I listed to soft, steady music, like lounge or new age.

OK, there's clearly a reason why I avoid recruiting threads...

...you become suicidal at the thought of being around smokers [no, I am not a smoker], but you'd intentionally listen to Lounge Musak....or New Age (rhymes with "sewage") music??

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