Alcohol Quiets Down My Tinnitus

Yes, me too. Hopefully it gets better this weekend for me haha I've recently been having a spike this week. Hopefully it resolves soon.

 

I had a glass of wine today and it made the ringing go away, then it came back after 2 hours along with a high pitched time which scared the shi* out of me, then it disappeared and went back to the baseline usual ring.

Also one glass of wine seems to help and not cause the rebound effect along with the other tone, once I start to have a 2nd or 3rd wine, then I start to dig my own grave, and go into the danger zone of the ringing rebounding along with the other scary tone after the hour or so. One glass seems to be perfect though.

 

@Lulu187 I am liking your post, but want to clarify that each person needs to find his balance point, and for you it seems one glass. I try generally to be moderate in my drinking and my T subsides. But there have been two occasions, for me, where I went overboard on the drinking, and the T went silent and stayed that way well into the next day.

People are different, and the right mix/level of this and that needs to be found.

Good luck on your journey.

 

Alcohol is the only thing that turns my tinnitus off (two beers = roughly two hours tinnitus free)

PS. Except for Prednisone, I have tried everything else mentioned on this forum: Melatonin, Curcumin, NAC, GABA, Magnesium, Zinc, B complex, Betahistine, Ginkgo, Fasting….

 

I’ve been avoiding alcohol for fear that would increase my tinnitus based on what I have read and heard anecdotally, as I know for many it can cause spikes. I have found that in fact, more often than not, drinking alcohol actually quiets my tinnitus.

Does anybody that phenomenon? I’m not a big drinker by the way and don’t do it frequently.

 

In my case red wine helps a lot, I take it only during dinner, and calms me down on the very bad days, I do not know if really makes it quieter or I just become more relaxed and unaware of it. But definitely helps and I always have a bottle of spanish "tinto" in my kitchen ready to help.

 

I think the eating out and drinking was becoming a problem for me. I was sort of wining and dining myself to self-medicate the depression brought on by tinnitus and loneliness. Due to COVID-19 I haven't had a drink in, I dunno, about 5 months now. Now that I just turned 50 I might want to use COVID-19 to keep me from relapsing. I mean, I sometimes miss the experience of going out to drink, but I don't think that's really in the cards at least until after there's a vaccine, even if the restaurants are open. That's far enough in the future that I really should try to make a permanent shift away from alcohol.

I always sort of flip-flop between a hedonist and health-kick approach to self-medication. Both do the job but the former is a hell of a lot easier. Even though I'm not drinking my diet is not very good and I'm not getting any exercise outside of yard work.

 

I'm only two weeks in with tinnitus and hadn't read anything about not consuming alcohol. For sure, two beers in things got a lot quieter - but I think it was just because ALL my senses are dulled with some alchohol.

I do feel like it got a little worse the next day, though - but then I had been panicking and a night or two with my friends and some booze did a lot to quiet me down. I'm going to be moderate with alcohol going forward, though. Even medical doctors all agree it's poison.

 

How come is it that some get tinnitus relief from alcohol, others don't, and some get worse? It confuses me!

 

The same reason why there is still no cure from tinnitus: it is very complex and possibly has several - or maybe even many underlying different mechanisms for each individual. Alcohol increases GABA so it can be linked with the hypothesis that at least for some people the tinnitus mechanism is related with the lack of GABA in the auditory cortex to lower the hyperactivity of the neurons, etc.

 

Like for so many in this thread alcohol seems to work for me as well. I have made several tests and the usual pattern is like this. 1-2 makes tinnitus worse. 3-4 my left side prominent tinnitus moves completely to right side. This is actually the weirdest part. So alcohol suppress left side tinnitus but then brain compensates and moves it to right side? 5-8 drinks and then it is pretty quiet. No matter how hard I listen I cannot hear it or maybe there is very faint sound level 1 or 2. Also the next day and the day after that are often better than normal.

I also dug out some research on the topic. It clearly shows that people are different.

"22% of the sample reporting that drinking worsened tinnitus, 62% reporting no effect of alcohol on tinnitus and 16% reporting that alcohol improved tinnitus."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/03005369509076743

"we have found that 22% and 15% respectively reported this aggravation with similar proportions 16% and 33% reporting that alcohol relieved their tinnitus."
https://europepmc.org/article/med/10225155

Brain scanner study on 5 individuals that get help from alcohol:
"alcohol can help in coping with tinnitus transiently and has a clear impact on... brain areas are important in distress in general and in tinnitus related distress specifically."
"a decrease in conscious awareness of the tinnitus."
"brain areas involved in the tinnitus perception such as the auditory cortex and parahippocampus did not show any differences before and after alcohol intake."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10548-011-0191-0

 

Alcohol is a depressant and suppresses your nervous system. It binds to GABA like benzos and calms down the rapid neuron firing that causes tinnitus, so it makes sense. Also reduces my tremor.

 

Benzos also work only in part of the population. In a study 23% (9/38) got really big improvement, 2/3 or more reduction in tinnitus loudness, from Benzos, while 55% got almost nothing:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22626945/

Interestingly the share of people that get improvement is roughly the same in Alcohol and in Benzos, ~20%. I wonder if those are the same people? Even more support for the "20% of individuals get help with GABA" hypothesis from the above paper is quoted below.

"Aminoxyacetic acid, a GABA potentiator, significantly quieted tinnitus in 21% of subjects in a placebo-controlled study. In an open uncontrolled study, primidone, another GABA potentiator, has been reported to provide morethan 80% relief to 11 of 41 tinnitus patients. In animals, vigabatrin and taurine, both GABA potentiators, reversibly reduces behavioural evidence of tinnitus."

Benzos and Vigabatrin (mentioned above) both are not good long term solutions. I doubt that Taurine supplements actually do anything. I already eat lot of fish and eggs. I guess I should consider myself lucky and continue with alcohol.

 

I do not understand your post saying only 23 percent got big improvement from benzos? When I click on the link you provide, I see the opposite results of what you have stated, I see 74 percent got big improvement from benzos (clonazepam). I see this:

Results: Comparing before and after each drug, clonazepam significantly improved tinnitus loudness (74% of subjects), duration (63%), annoyance (79%), and tinnitus handicap inventory score (61%), whereas the G biloba showed no significant differences on any of these measures.

Conclusion: Clonazepam is effective in treating tinnitus

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22626945/

Can you explain / elaborate?

 

Sure.

"Comparing before and after each drug, clonazepam significantly improved tinnitus loudness (74% of subjects), duration (63%), annoyance (79%)"

This sentence means two things:

1) There is a statistical significant difference between clonazepam and placebo (gingo). Please note that statistically significant difference does not equal practical significance. It is just statistics.

2) Tinnitus loudness improved in 74% of subjects. This is the share of subject that received benefits no matter how small. For example if my tinnitus were to go from 6 to 5 with Benzos it would not be worth it. If it went from 6 to 0 then it might be worth it. This is because Benzos have serious harms as well.

Therefore, I only considered how many individuals got 66%-100% improvement in loudess Visual Analog Scale (0-10). Data from table below. I hope this helps.



"Conclusion: Clonazepam is effective in treating tinnitus."
Should be rewritten as:
"Conclusion: Clonazepam is very effective in treating tinnitus in some patients but many patients get zero benefits."

 

I don't disagree but it's only a bit short of feeling like a miracle if you're in the high-benefit group.

I feel like Clonazepam mediates the response more than the volume and pitch, though, and Gabapentin seems to, when combined with Clonazepam, tamp down on volume and pitch a bit, too. It's all very strange, and, 3 years in, I worry that it will eventually stop working... (though I was also on Clonazepam at the same dose from 1999-2004 for other reasons mostly, with no loss of efficacy).

 

Can someone just try it out and see to which group he belongs? I mean, was the benefit night and day for you once you got on the drug? How much of a volume reduction are we speaking? Could you make an estimate?

Thanks!

 

Yes and no; a huge component of tinnitus distress is often anxiety which can lead to muscle tension and pain. Klonopin will do something to help those problems in many cases, even if it doesn't do anything else to the tinnitus. Someone who feels less distressed may have a hard time explaining or even understanding exactly why.

I can't because I don't think about it in those terms. Before I grudgingly went on this med cocktail I'd essentially spent 6 years thinking about tinnitus nearly 24/7, and somehow managing to jam my job and marriage and everything else into the periphery of it, and frequently broke down in fits of agonizing pain and depression.

Since I've been medicated I am aware of my tinnitus far less, I generally spend most of my days thinking about other things, but it will still creep into my consciousness, and any time I experience any kind of period of heavy stress, the bad tinnitus comes back, along with all my other anxiogenic symptoms (sweat across the brow, shaky hands, inability to think clearly, sense that the whole world is "hostile" and "dark"). I've also noticed a heavy correlation between the severity of my TMJD symptoms, and my tinnitus, and anxiety in general.

I don't want to be too glowy on benzos because I'd done the withdrawal from them twice, it's a nightmare, and because I was heavily involved in a benzo withdrawal community for a number of years, I know all kinds of horrifying anecdotes about benzo use leading to people's lives being upended or destroyed.

It's a difficult calculus, and my best advice, really, is "if you're about to eat a bullet, then maybe try a long acting benzo at a moderate dose for a while, maybe combined with Gabapentin". I think Gabapentin by itself was worthless to me, and I think these drugs overall are dangerous enough that this is unwise unless you're literally at that point of desperation.

It took me six or seven years of trying everything else under the sun, being a lab rat in two different tinnitus research studies, and ultimately probably spending $20,000 - $30,000 looking for other ideas and solutions before saying "sigh, alright, fuck it, give me the pills". I do not regret any of that time or expense because it led me to be pretty firmly convinced I'd tried everything else.

Benzos aren't magic for me, neither is Gabapentin. The combination seems to give me a higher quality of life for the moment.

 

You deserve an F'in cure.

 

Positive topline OTO-413 results. Anecdotally positive FX-322 results and safety study. I believe the cure is truly coming this time.

 

We all do.

We Shall All Be Healed (Unreleased)- the...

 

Same here, I am so pleased to happen come across this thread. I also have been avoiding alcohol fearing it would make my tinnitus worse, but I think I will have to break out the whiskey.

Keeping my fingers crossed...

 

Update:

Yes it worked for me also. About 2 oz of Whiskey on the rocks. I love listening to music, but it has been hard as of late. It lessened the tinnitus for about 1 hour, to the point I could basically ignore it completely. I listened to side 1 of Dreamboat Annie. It was fantastic.