High-Frequency Tinnitus Related to Inflammation

Greetings, fellow sufferers!

Like most of us here, I only have a few clues as to causes of my tinnitus.

I've experienced short term tinnitus after noise exposure when I was a young adult, but that went away. But about 25 years ago, I started getting high pitched (8-10 kHz) sizzle in both ears that is made worse by inflammation.

My big clue was that one particularly bad allergy season, I did a course of oral Prednisone, and the tinnitus completely disappeared for days. But it returned. Alas, later courses of Prednisone did not have the same effect.

I do have about 60-70 dB loss at 8 kHz, but only 20-30 dB at 1 kHz. I really think most audiology testing is very rough, and doesn't deal with tinnitus much at all. It's not clear to me how much of my loss at 8 kHz is due to the tinnitus masking the tones or actual loss.

I recently started trialing a pair of ReSound Preza hearing aids from Costco. I'm not that satisfied with the fittings.

I do computer networking for a living, specializing in firewalls and packet capture. I'm an amateur audio engineer, occasional ham radio operator, and tinker in electronics.

I've been reading a lot of audiology papers and a couple of books, and hope to do some real-ear type experiments. I'll be looking for others doing the same.

=seymour=

 

Yes, there's something related to inflammation behind the tinnitus process. Ear is hurt and some inflammation occurs to deal with damages just like in any wound. The point is that at some point the inflammation must leave.

Some people use curcumin, others anti-TNF, etc. For most of them it helps but never cures.

So at this point theories are about restoring hair cells (FX-322 trials occurring for years now), others about treating the inflammation, others about restoring some neural/nerve connections.