Is My Life Expectancy Now Shortened? Will I Become Stupid?

I agree ENT's and doctors should show much more empathy, but what do you expect them to tell you? There is no cure, the "treatments" are expensive with no guarantee. Mine told me it MAY go away, and it does for a lot of people; obviously it didn't in my case - but he didn't lead me on with a fake hope and tell me to shoot for rainbows with unproven treatments or cures. I think everybody is disillusioned by their doctor because they are going through something extremely scary, and when a doctor tells them "there is nothing we can do" it only builds resentment (assuming all basic medical checks were conducted). I was furious at my doctor.

But, was the doctor incorrect? No, they won't. There is no medically accepted cure, yet. And that certainly does suck!

 

This is something I have been wondering about. Do you have any medical information to support this?

 

There have not been any studies about the basic things like what can make this condition worse, so they have nothing to tell us. But it is important to not fool oneself and to think that they know much/anything about this condition.

 

Hearing loss and tinnitus are seperate conditions, they often overlap but also often don’t. Some people have hearing loss and no tinnitus, and then others have tinnitus and no detectable or insignificant hidden hearing loss. There is a variety of studies around with evidence for this.

Medically, how can you prove a person with tinnitus with all exact variables would get MORE hearing loss than a person without tinnitus if in the identical situation? You can't prove it either way. Perhaps there is more genetic factors at play than simply "tinnitus ears" which is not related to the tinnitus itself. The heterogeneous nature of tinnitus is also at play.

Everybody should protect their ears in damaging environments, tinnitus or not! Don't let fear control your life and think that you will likely become deaf as a result of having tinnitus, the only difference between us and other people is that further hearing loss MAY or MAY NOT cause a worsening of our condition. Not that we are susceptible to increase risk of a hearing threshold shift given the same circumstances to our fellow non sufferers.

 

Well anatomically they would know more than most of us here. As for being up to date with the latest research, they probably won’t be unless a cure or effective treatment makes it to all the medical journals. And since it hasn’t, can you expect them to care?

I always found the audiologist your best friend for tinnitus advice. I went to 4, and was lucky to find a very helpful gentleman.

 

My T was caused by a single noise in my ear. (Just my left ear.) I don't think I have hearing loss. If I do, it's not noticeable to me. I've been concerned that my left ear is now more susceptible to damage and to increased T on the theory that once a body part is damaged, it's weaker and less resilient than it once was.

I would love to be wrong about this.

 

Have you had a higher frequency audiogram?

I don’t believe you’re more susceptible to hearing loss, but since your tinnitus friend has joined your life I would take more care than should he/she not decided to join your life. Try to avoid any acoustic traumas if you can with ear plugs in damaging environments. There is a few studies that suggest hearing loss levels is linked to tinnitus levels, but not conclusive.

I recommend using this http://www.noisehelp.com/noise-dose.html and an app on your phone as a “guide”. If you have hypercusis, this is especially important as 40db may feel like 100db so hearing protection is not required.

 

I haven't had an audiogram. I'm terrified of doctors, so I'm not motivated to see a doctor who I already know cannot cure me. If I have some hearing loss, it can't be reversed. Knowing about it wouldn't change anything, other than to increase my anxiety.

I had a new noise exposure a month ago. Before that, the only changes I made in my life were to give up my ipod and concerts. I don't believe the new noise exposure actually increased my T long-term, but I nearly jumped out of my skin when it surprised me and I think I've had H since then. Now I startle at every high-pitched tone and high-pitched tones are everywhere.

The only reason I don't buy a smartphone with a sound meter app is that the noises I'm worried about don't last long enough to be measured. My noise exposure a month ago was from sitting directly next to an office door that made a high-pitched beep when it was opened. I had no warning and the beep lasted about three seconds.

So I either wear ear protection all the time to cover such random incidents or I take my chances. Healthy ears can (apparently) withstand these beeps, but I wonder if my damaged ear can't handle what healthy ears can handle. It's a huge change in my life if every beep from a door or a TV or an elevator can worsen my T.

 

Is it the case that your spike is currently as loud as it was a week after the incident?

 

I don't think it is. In retrospect, I think I had become so habituated to my T that when the new exposure brought it to my attention in such a sudden and forceful way, I thought it was louder.

The moment the noise happened, I instantly feared that my T would increase. In the days following, I developed first discomfort in my ears, then tension in my jaw on the left side, and finally, increased sensitivity to sound.

Reading about TTTS actually reduced my anxiety a little bit and my new symptoms decreased as well. But I still have these symptoms. They are very mild when I've been in a quiet and more predictable environment for a while. But they increase after I'm exposed to sudden high-pitched sounds.

I'm trying to remain calm when exposed to predictable high-pitched tones that I have lived with for years: toaster, microwave, elevator. But the beep on TV whenever someone curses always makes me jump because I don't know when it's coming.

If what @Pleasure_Paulie says is true (that T ears are not more suspectible to further trauma than healthy ears) it would be a big relief to me. At least I would not have to fear the sounds I've been living with for years.

 

This statement I don't think I agree with. If a person has "tinnitus ears" because of acoustic trauma, then acoustic trauma was the cause. In that case, the person is also prone to so-called accelerated ageing of the cochlea (even in a best-case scenario i.e. in a scenario that does not include repeat exposure). By simple logical implication, a person who experiences a repeat noise trauma is therefore even more susceptible to further damage than in the best-case scenario.

There is quite a bit of literature on this specific topic by Prof. Kujawa which includes animal models where the noise exposure only resulted in temporary threshold shifts and yet, when long-term follow-up assessments were done, evidence showed accelerated ageing in these "benign" exposures. Prof. Kujawa is a prolific author on this topic as can be seen here (just a small sample):

• Aging after noise exposure: acceleration of cochlear synaptopathy in "recovered" ears
  
• Acceleration of age-related hearing loss by early noise exposure: evidence of a misspent youth
  
• Adding insult to injury: cochlear nerve degeneration after "temporary" noise-induced hearing loss

Some of her publications go back a decade, and so, it shouldn't really be news to anyone (I mean it's not like they discovered these results last week).

From the paper published in 2015:



To understand synaptopathy in humans, this by itself would not lead to a measurable hearing loss via a pure-tone audiogram. So it cannot be observed, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. And indeed synaptopathy is the earliest stage of hearing loss which can manifest itself as hidden hearing loss (detectable by speech-in-noise testing).

From Prof. Kujawa's profile:

"An area of current focus in Dr. Kujawa’s laboratory is the aging of noise-exposed ears. She has discovered an insidious process that begins acutely after noise, as a loss of communications (synapses) between sensory inner hair cells and cochlear neurons. Loss of the neurons themselves follows slowly, but ultimately reaches the same magnitude. These effects of noise immediately and permanently change the way the ear processes sound information, and they occur even when the exposure produces only temporary changes in hearing thresholds; i.e., for exposures previously thought to be ‘safe’.

Moreover, she has shown that such exposures dramatically accelerate the gradual loss of cochlear synapses and cochlear neurons otherwise seen with aging alone. This work has provided the first clear evidence that noise exposure continues to have damaging effects on the ear and hearing long after the noise has stopped."

 

Is there a thread in the forum regarding this paper? I wasn't aware of it. It's rather informative.

 

Not that I am aware of. But the topic of what is "safe sound exposure" and whether those who "have existing damage are more susceptible to further auditory decline" is discussed an awful lot on public boards. And so, I decided to weigh in with a bit of input to challenge the "old school" of members who tend to regurgitate outdated knowledge – which – likely would include your local ENT down-the-block...

Work by Prof. Kujawa (and others) should have a much more prominent place and be disseminated on the social media from time-to-time by the various actors in the tinnitus community.

 

Try LED light therapy for an in-expensive way to see if you can stabilize/very slightly improve your T.

 

This literature is probably worthy of a new entire thread. I'm sure others would have thoughts on the research as well.

It's also potentially the case that a large percentage of the community in adulthood have hidden hearing loss; especially in the west. This is however not realised due to no tinnitus onset which often starts an individual to undertake a barrage of hearing related tests which may uncover any underlying issues. Thus this research should not be exclusively considered for only "tinnitus ears".

 

I was thinking about life expectancy today, and considering the stress, inability to ever relax or truly enjoy myself, I would be surprised if my life expectancy isn't impacted greatly. I may just drop dead of a heart attack from it all. Then of course there is the chance it might become all too much and I opt for the other way out. Then my life expectancy would have been cut drastically short by all this.

 

I’m 25 also and had ringing in my right ear for since June. Still hoping it’ll go away every day. How did it start for you?

 

You won't become stupid but it will be harder to concentrate and you certainly will not be able to use your mind to its full potential. This is why the drugs that are showing hope for our condition need to be RUSHED through their trials. Right now there are 2 drugs going through clinical trials that can regenerate the damage we have to our inner ears that are based on the same technology and one of the trial participants said it alleviated his tinnitus according to someone that knows about their situation. Right now there is a set of trials in which it takes 3 months for them to dose and then measure the results but because of government regulations, it takes 1 whole year to review and verify the results. This is almost 4x longer than it should take.

 

I would have loved to have been a trial participant. So it didn't cure the guy?

They won't be rushed through though, and we know it.

How many years before they end up on the market, and what % of sufferers will they actually help?

 

Tinnitus often gets blamed for many things including loss of cognitive function over time.
I find it to be the opposite and there can be a clear upside to health and fitness as well.

Many may question how so? Quite simply how I train. Because there is no cure for tinnitus, I simply train to outrun my tinnitus which has transformed me into the fast white guy on the planet:

Fastest White People Of All Time ᴴᴰ ||...