Hyperacusis without the Pain

Do you have more information on this? I never heard of this. Has anybody had BOTH their tinnitus and hyperacusis resolve as a result of tensor tympani or stapedial surgery?

 

People who have TTTS without H had their ear pain stopped by cutting this muscle,people tend to combine everything noise sensitivity related into the term Hyperacusis when it's not that simple.

Hyperacusis is a collapsed tolerance to sound or extreme sensitivity to sound.

Noxacusis is a collapsed tolerance to sound or extreme sensitivity to sound with pain.

TTTS can occur with or without T and H and why this happens we don't know.

People with TTTS classify this as H as their muscle spasms from certain sounds causing them pain even though they're not actually sensitive to these sounds,cutting the muscle stops the spasms and hooray they're cured.

But with someone who has H cutting this muscle could make things worse,it tightens everytime you speak so that your own voice doesn't deafen you so can you imagine how loud someone with H's voice would sound to them without this muscle to dampen it?

People with H can also have TTTS and a lot do myself included but cutting the muscle would only stop the ear pain and not in any way help the sensitivity to noise that comes with H.

 

I think its more targeted towards TTTS somatic symptoms which tend to be what a lot describe as clicks, flutters, thumps, and of course pain. Not sure of hyperacusis, I guess it would depend on what was driving the hyperacusis i.e whether its central or originates within the middle-ear via muscle spasm/hypertonicity, but no it doesn't appear to be a treatment generally for tinnitus. That one is too high up inside the nervous system per current thinking. Japongus again. He knows more.

 

There's a guy on YouTube(I'll look him up now and post the name of the video below)who told his viewers that he had H when in actual fact he didn't.
Sound would cause his ear to stab with pain but it was a result of Eustachian tube disfunction and once he had the muscles cut he was back making music completely cured.

If he had H he wouldn't be able to tolerate music and this is where the confusion kicks in as to what H is.

Some say ear pain triggered by sound is H even though they're not sensitive to noise and others say being extremely sensitive to noise is H which I agree is the real meaning of H and the two often get combined together in a blanket term.

 

This is important. Definitions are hard to nail down, but they need to be nailed down. There is still a lot of confusion out there about what exactly is what. TTTS is not the same as hyperacusis but it can accompany it, though it doesn't have to. Some regard hyperacusis as volume-based intolerance but here in Australia they are tending to lump all intolerances of sound itself as definable as hyperacusis. I would consider TTTS to be a different condition again though I'm sure some correlations between it and hyperacusis exist but you can have one without the other. I rarely get TTTS symptoms as they are commonly described here and when I do they aren't that severe, but I get a sound intolerance that, while not objectively loud is searingly uncomfortable. Its also oddly intermittent and seems to relate directly to tinnitus intensity, so I don't think tenotomy would benefit me. I'm always open to a change of heart though...shit I'd cut off a leg to get free of this.

 

Exactly!I mean just go look at this video real quick and you'll see what I mean.

The video is on YouTube and it's called"My hearing is even more broken"
By Dan Bull.

What he describes is TTTS or maybe Eustachian tube dysfunction but his doctors told him he had H,when he doesn't.

The reason they diagnosed him with H is because his ear stabbed by sound but he didn't have an intolerance to sound,their diagnosis was purely down to him experiencing pain from sound.
I followed him up after this video and he's fully cured,had a tenactomy whatever you call it and he's back blasting music like he was before.
If H were that simple everyone here would be cured.

 

Is this H? Yesterday, my fingertips felt the vibrations of my friends' voices bounce off the lid of the plastic cup I was holding. My ears felt fine, though. I had earplugs on, but I took them out for a bit to check if my fingers could still feel the vibrations. Yep, still did.

 

He is? I couldn't find anything about his ear problems after he had the grommets inserted which made his symptoms worse. But yeah, he doesn't have what I would call hyperacusis either.

 

Wow I think you might be onto something! Didn't know eustachian tube dysfunction can cause that!! But I gotta ask: what's the difference between sound and noise? Sorry if this is stupid question

 

I might be wrong but I think Hyperacusis Research talked about noxacusis being hyperacusis, but with lingering, chronic pain. Hyperacusis can still be painful but the pain is more direct upon stimuli.

 

In my first year with this I could feel percussive sounds run across my jaw as a tactile sensation. I think damage to nerves can cause cross-talk where a stimulus, say sound, triggers activity in alternative nerve pathways, which generate their own innate kind of response. Nerves are really just electrical conduits and they are pretty densely packed through the head and brain.

 

I started watching more of his videos to see if I could find any sort of follow up on him but I couldn't find any,in one of his later videos his mother commented on one saying he had surgery on his ear muscles and was feeling much much better and should be back making music soon.

I took that and the fact that he's back making music as a sign that the operation worked.

 

Interesting, but what sort of surgery? I know that after the failed grommets surgery in july 2015, he was thinking about doing the surgery where you put a balloon in the ear and that's the last time I heard anything about his condition. This Reddit post says the last time he talked about his issues was in may 2016.



But yeah, from the looks of it he must be feeling better since he hasn't mentioned his condition in a long time and doesn't seem to be having any trouble with noise since he makes music, goes to conventions etc.

 

I've no idea what surgery he had,after that comment from his mother there was literally nothing else to follow up on that I could find.

Presumably it was successful as he hasn't really brought it up since and as you said he continues to attend conventions and such,something he wouldn't be doing if he had H or ear pain from sound.

 

Seems like he had some sort of TMJ surgery in august 2015 but since he claimed it was still bad in may 2016 I don't know if it helped much.

Jaws

 

Did that go away?

 

yes. It has. very rarely it sneaks back, but nothing like it was.

 

I sent a long email with suggestions to him last year when I found his page, after that I found out he was a youtuber. IIRC he seemed to have palatal myoclonus and ttts was only a sideshow, as I remember saying his seemed more facial whereas mine seemed more ear-centered. I'll see if I can ask him if he got anything done to his ear muscles. What's the video of the mother you're referring to?

 

Honestly I can't remember,it was a LONG time ago when I came across his videos.

I began reading a lot of the comments on one of them to see what others were suggesting that's when I seen the message from his mother saying he had surgery and is doing much better.

Lapidus showed me another video of him getting jaw surgery so that must have been what she was talking about,how he is today I'm not fully sure.

 

The jaw surgery was done a short time after the grommet surgery and I don't think it helped since he kept saying he had troubles after that. So I don't think it was that surgery his mother talked about either. On his twitter he posted this in februari 2016.

This makes me wonder. He claims that sounds are louder and painful which sounds like he indeed has H, yet it doesn't look like that since he keeps making music and seemingly lives a normal life.

 

I last spoke with him July this year and he was tired of chasing doctors around when they'd just ignore him. So I assume if the mother's comments were more recent than that then he's in the same position.

 

H can come in many odd forms. Me for instance I find it a lot easier to speak than to listen, because the peaks and the troughs of sound change are a lot steeper in the second instance.

 

Yes, of course, but Dan Bull complained about spasms and pain when he spoke. That's why it's so odd that he can rap, talk loudly etc now.

 

@bill 112
@japongus

I just checked his facebook and saw a comment made on a post from december 27 regarding his hearing. I think we can scratch that he's done some surgery that made him better.

 

No one on the forums who said their sound sensitivity was cured by tenotomy explicitly to my recollection said their tinnitus had disappeared too. However there is a mysterious case in Brazil that was documented of ''continuous high frequency tinnitus'' that could be heard from the outside, that was cured by tenotomy. However no mention of hyperacusis or sound sensitivity is made.

I posted the article and some comments here months ago:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/2016-aro-hyperacusis-seminar-summary.15607/#post-187548

 

Hearing sensitivity. Like you are hearing noises that are just driving you nuts. It is VERY treatable from my experience and from what my doctors have told me. I got it so bad that I could hear my toes on the carpet, I could hear tones jump out at me and sound crazy loud in songs that I had never heard before (in songs that I have listened to in years). I could hear the screeching in escalators at shopping centers I never in my life noticed. I could hear a persons cell phone go off all the way across a target. Any high pitch noise sound extra loud to me. Noises in general seemed so much louder and I was very tempted to wear earplugs because noise sounded as if they were damaging my ears. My doctor reccomended not wearing ear plugs and to go on as normal as long as noises were not damaging to anyone in a regular circumstance. It worked and I am not bothered by H anymore. Yes noises seem louder than they did before but not in a really bothersome way.

 

My h reacts at like 40 db it seems….light switch, plastic bags etc....

 

Those sounds are much higher than 40db.

 

Well, minor sounds anyways, maybe 60?

 

The muscles can be tonically contracted, too loud when they should be quiet, reverberating to external sound when they shouldn't. The cells inside them can be damaged, like when people with otitis have these symptoms. The notion that they're protecting us from external sounds because is central gain theory, which has never discussed the middle ear and took for granted that objective tests like the stapedial reflex tests disproved middle ear pathologies. Lib and others at chat-h showed no abnormal stapedial reflex.