Acoustic CR® Neuromodulation: a New Treatment for Tinnitus

[Frédéric]

I found this link today : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158217301225
Acute effects and after-effects of acoustic coordinated reset neuromodulation in patients with chronic subjective tinnitus

 

[GregCA]

I found this link today : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158217301225
Acute effects and after-effects of acoustic coordinated reset neuromodulation in patients with chronic subjective tinnitus

Thanks. It seems reasonably positive about ACRN's impact. I'm glad there is still work done in that area.

 

[Samir]

Highlights

• Acute effects and acute after-effects of dedicated tinnitus sound therapy are studied with EEG.
• Sound therapy causing long-lasting, sustained effects causes pronounced acute after-effects.
• Acute EEG after-effects might serve as marker to develop desynchronizing sound therapy.

Personally, I recently started experimenting with notched music and notched white noise, and I have experienced what to me seemed like complete suppression of tinnitus for a short duration after stopping the playback (i.e. acute after-effects). I had best experience with white noise. So I think there is more to sound and music therapy, and it is worth further investigation. So I am glad that the researchers are still investigating these treatment options. Maybe we can know more.

 

[Paulmanlike]

Hi,

The Desyncra team emailed me back as they had informed me a research paper was being published in the USA for Desyncra.

It is starting soon, with results to be expected in 2 years.

Hopefully it will be positive and build up on the evidence base for ACRN.

 

[Paulmanlike]

@Dr. Jay Hobbs

You know anything about this (see post above)

 

[Paulmanlike]

There's a trial now being conducted in Portland USA to determine its efficacy between ACRN and standard treatment (CBT). See www.dysencra.com and follow the link.

Did anybody ever get sustained improvement with ACRN?

 

[Frédéric]

Just to update this thread, full text below :
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2017.00036/full

Please note, the abstract has already been published by @Aaron123 :
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...-acrn-available-on-the-nhs.21297/#post-245321

Now, acoustic-cr®-neuromodulation is marketed by (as far as I know):
The Tinnitus Clinic Ltd. in UK : http://www.tinnitusclinic.co.uk
Neurotherapies Reset in Germany: http://www.neurotherapiesreset.com
Swisstinnitus AG in Switzerland: http://www.swisstinnitus.ch
Beter Horen in Netherlands: http://www.beterhoren.nl

 

[Paulmanlike]

It's worth noting though that the evidence base for ACRN is still very small and I would advise anybody paying the Tinnitus Clinic £4,500 to wait if the evidence base builds up.

 

[Adam0309]

There are quite a lot of pages on this thread - too many for me to read through, so apologies if I am not on the right subtopic. However, I was looking for somewhere to document my experience with ACRN at The Tinnitus Clinic on Harley Street. Long story short, it failed for me.

Furthermore, my tinnitus worsened in the months I was using the device. That could be natural progression, other causes, or caused by ACRN. I have to way to disentangle these. However, I thought it was a piece of data worth sharing that may or may not help someone weighing up whether to try the treatment or not.

 

[Jazzer]

I can understand what you are saying. I agree partly.
It is not only tinnitus that needs a cure. Hearing loss needs research.

Imagen how much people are willing to pay, if companies find a cure for hearing loss!
I believe that companies that started to invest in research already concluded this. If they are able to cure, or partial cure hearing loss, these companies will be able to make a lot of money.

And because tinnitus and hyperacusis, in most cases, originate from hearing loss, this cure could very well treat these afflictions at the same time.
But again, I agree with you. It is way too expensive.

If what you are saying regarding AUT0063 is true, some people make this world a sadder place than I even Imagined.

&Reinier - can I ask for an update on how this treatment progressed.
Did you stay with the programme?
Did your volume decrease?
Jazzer

 

[Reinier]

@Jazzer
Sure. I am happy to give an update.
First of all I am not using the Neuromodulation a lot anymore.
It didn't seem to help in my case.
But I still use it occasionally. Perhaps with my decreased anxiety the therapy will do something.

 

[Jiri]

Hi everybody,

I'm a bit strapped for time so didn't get myself a chance to read the whole threat just yet. I came across this awhile ago. What do you think? Yay or Nay? It looks legit.



Edit: According to this study it looks promising too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4362296/

 

[FredMacMurray]

Hi everybody,

I'm a bit strapped for time so didn't get myself a chance to read the whole threat just yet. I came across this awhile ago. What do you think? Yay or Nay? It looks legit.

That video says a lot to me - here are my quick thoughts (I registered just to comment on this...)

• If they are able to see the hyperactivity in the hearing center for each ear, they could theoretically tell you with relative certainty which tone or tone range your tinnitus is in.
• I would guess that the copies we've seen, like that on generalfuzz.net can't quite replicate this 100%. They mentioned that the tones and timing are modulated in the video, but it's not quite clear by what degree. Do we need to randomize the timing? It's not clear if the intent is to 'surprise' the ear with a tone at any given time or if we just want to make it repeatedly fire off when it hears different tones.
• I noticed that they leave out anything about volume. Is the point to make the ear strain to hear it, or to make it so it cannot miss it?
• If the goal is just to 'exercise' the hearing center - then why would music rich at or near the tinnitus frequencies not have a similar effect? It would seem to me that exciting the cortex with many and changing frequencies would be preferable to highlighting 4 specific frequencies.
• If they can tell exactly where the brain is overexcited, can we de-escalate this area through more mechanical means more readily than via the (possibly damaged) ear structure?
• I personally have different tones in each ear, which come and go over the more general 'tibetan singing bowl'-type ringing. I bet they could tune this to separate tones in each ear if they wanted to.

 

[Paulmanlike]

I went to the Tinnitus Clinic here in the UK and was prepared to spend the £4500 for the treatment, anyway they couldn't get me to reach residual inhibition through the tones and was instead told to give the Levo system a try. I thought I'm not spending almost 5 grand to get used to it, anyway I gave it a miss. Now I'm not spending thousands on anything that hasn't been proven to work. I did get in touch with Desyncra as well who the company behind ACRN and they told me they recruiting for a study in USA and the results will be published in 2 years (that was about 6 months ago).

Best of luck to any of giving it a try, your tinnitus definitely has to be tonal up to 10 kHz and easily identifiable for it to (allegedly) work.

It's also worth mentioning "TinAway" is another therapy in development from some guys in Australia. From what I think about it, it's another sound therapy aimed at curing chronic tinnitus. Yes a bit of a large claim, but could the cure be in sound therapy like this or ACRN? I even read an article from the top audiologist from the tinnitus clinic some have even had their tinnitus go away completely with ACRN.

Still, my tinnitus is not easily recognisable/unable to tell frequency and it's not a constant tone.

 

[Shid0x]

All those prizes are crazy expensive for such a simple algorithm used.
Anyways this seems to work for me, i have noise inducted tinnitus and i can change it by moving my jaw around (which seems to be a pretty common case since even the new Susan Shore device is based on that ).

My T is quite high pitched ( 12 khz ) but after some time using ACRN it actually did get much better, its still here of course but the intensity lowered and the frequency is much more supportable.
Funnily enough i was never a fan of white noise since it seemed to spike mine actually.

This leads me to believe that a fusion between ACRN and electric simulation would really work great ( even if i'm aware dr shore device isn't fully acrn based its similar )

 

[Hazel]

Hi there, so here are some results from the TT survey of 2016 regarding ACRN:

So it's not a huge number of people that have reported any benefit from it.

I checked out the party that markets this in the Netherlands, Beter Horen, and they claim a 70% success rate. Yet, they fail to explain how they define and measure 'success.' My ENT told me he thinks they're reliable, but it's only been tested on a small sample so far. Also, the treatment costs over 3,000 euro's. I think I'll wait until there's a bit more evidence and/or it's covered by our national healthcare system.

 

[carlover]

Those results worse than the usual 25% placebo effect ,how bad is that...plus £4500 wasted which could have bought me a nice few holidays

 

[ee9892]

Is it OK to sleep with the ACRN playing next to me every night? I use the video below every night because it drowns my T. Just want to make sure its ok to play for long periods of time since people here are saying they only use it a couple hours a day.

 

[threefirefour]

Hi there, so here are some results from the TT survey of 2016 regarding ACRN:

View attachment 15826

So it's not a huge number of people that have reported any benefit from it.

I checked out the party that markets this in the Netherlands, Beter Horen, and they claim a 70% success rate. Yet, they fail to explain how they define and measure 'success.' My ENT told me he thinks they're reliable, but it's only been tested on a small sample so far. Also, the treatment costs over 3,000 euro's. I think I'll wait until there's a bit more evidence and/or it's covered by our national healthcare system.

I think part of it is that the 70% tried it for months. We should do a survey of people who did it for a long time.

 

[Hazel]

Actually, we have those numbers in the survey as well @threefirefour . If I have time later this week, I'll put together a more detailed breakdown.

 

[threefirefour]

Actually, we have those numbers in the survey as well @threefirefour . If I have time later this week, I'll put together a more detailed breakdown.

That's great. ACRN usually takes a long time to work, so these numbers would be extremely helpful.

 

[carlover]

Is it OK to sleep with the ACRN playing next to me every night? I use the video below every night because it drowns my T. Just want to make sure its ok to play for long periods of time since people here are saying they only use it a couple hours a day.

this will mask your T use it as long as you like but proper treatment involves getting an exact match for your noise .In that regard this is sadly just a waste of time

 

[Hazel]

Is it OK to sleep with the ACRN playing next to me every night? I use the video below every night because it drowns my T. Just want to make sure its ok to play for long periods of time since people here are saying they only use it a couple hours a day.

@Steve might be able to advise you. The video/audio you posted is his, and he's very knowledgeable on audio therapies.

 

[Steve]

Is it OK to sleep with the ACRN playing next to me every night? I use the video below every night because it drowns my T. Just want to make sure its ok to play for long periods of time since people here are saying they only use it a couple hours a day.

Hi,

As it's a suppression type of sound I wold not use it too much. It tends to lose effect from over-use and the way the sounds are they can get a bit stuck in your head (like an annoying tune you can't get rid of)

I generally say 1 hour at a time and 4-5 times a day as the maximum.

I would say this for any sound really.

 

[threefirefour]

It's worth noting though that the evidence base for ACRN is still very small and I would advise anybody paying the Tinnitus Clinic £4,500 to wait if the evidence base builds up.

I wouldn't say it's very small, as the evidence suggests it's effective (to some degree), but it's not worth anywhere near 4k.

 

[Steve]

I wouldn't say it's very small, as the evidence suggests it's effective (to some degree), but it's not worth anywhere near 4k.

For me the main issue with the device is that they have patented an algorithm, developed a proprietary device and aren't looking at the broader picture.

You need to be able to design the therapy to the patient. If they aren't responding to the algorithm then you should be able to mix it up a little and have a range of approaches. People are not homogenous.

 

[Hazel]

That's great. ACRN usually takes a long time to work, so these numbers would be extremely helpful.

I have those numbers for you, will post them later this weekend. Been spending countless hours analysing TT survey results in Excel past few weeks (next to my regular full-time job) and nowhere near done. Bit demotivating as well to see certain people on other threads berating us for not doing it quickly enough, sigh.... Need to catch up on sleep/rest now

 

[Lakeside]

I have those numbers for you, will post them later this weekend. Been spending countless hours analysing TT survey results in Excel past few weeks (next to my regular full-time job) and nowhere near done. Bit demotivating as well to see certain people on other threads berating us for not doing it quickly enough, sigh.... Need to catch up on sleep/rest now

So, where are the results?

 

[annV]

I have those numbers for you, will post them later this weekend. Been spending countless hours analysing TT survey results in Excel past few weeks (next to my regular full-time job) and nowhere near done. Bit demotivating as well to see certain people on other threads berating us for not doing it quickly enough, sigh.... Need to catch up on sleep/rest now

Can you post the numbers please?

 

[Garrett M]

Hi, considering this a possible treatment option, but the cost is a concern. I am curious if others have tried this and what their results were?

Many thanks!
G