Is There a Connection Between Cause and Type of Tinnitus?

Is there a connection between cause (noise, drugs, pp.) and type (high pitched, ringing, whistling, roaring, hissing, chirping, sinus tone pp.) of the tinnitus?

 

Not really. Tinnitus is experienced differently by each person. A high pitched hissing is one of the most common types. If you haven't read my article: Tinnitus, A Personal View, you might find it helpful. Click on my started threads and it's in the list. I advise you not to use headphones even at low volume.

Michael

 

Hey Micheal.

How do you know a high pitched hissing is one of the most common types?

I remember reading a study where they found that a tonal sound (ringing of some kind) was a lot more common than an atonal sound (hissing).

 

Contrary to popular belief yes. Pulsatile that matches with heart may have to do with blood pressure, a high pitch tone may have to do with hearing loss, a fluttering may have to do with SCM issues, a somatic buzzing may have to do with neck or back issues, and a hissing is common amongst reduced hearing.

Bear in mind these are LIKELY connections, and it doesn't mean if you have a type, this IS the cause.

 

Yes, see here.

 

Apparently people with Meniere's are a bit more likely to have a low-pitched tinnitus, but people without meniere's get that too.

 

I am still convinced that a more detailed description of the noise in the ear would help to find the cause.
I find the description of the noises in the ears very superficial.
Basically, it's tinnitus, okay, understood. That is not enough for me.

 

I tend to agree, but the problem is whittling down a global community of descriptions into a fairly fixed set of common descriptors that would be reliable enough to use as a diagnostic tool. Using pain as an analogy, we have the the rating on a 1-10 scale for analgesic purposes, and that is really a distress scale, not a description, but there are some useful words and terms like cramping, shooting, aching, crushing, radiating etc that do have a clear diagnostic value and have a pretty accurate shared meaning between the patient and the history-taker. With tinnitus there are some words like ringing, hissing etc, but most of these are too non-specific to be useful descriptive tools, unless the history-taker also has tinnitus (what's the odds?). This is why tinnitus management strategies always fall back on the distress questionnaire model. Its as close as you can currently get to objectivity in describing something that (mostly) can only be described subjectively. Some advances in imaging accompanied by the development of a common language descriptive model would be a great way to go, but that would take a huge effort, probably more than any one Institution or Corporation would (so far) be prepared to invest in. More effort on the part of identifying and managing middle-ear myoclonus and ETD would be possible though with things as they are now.

 

Well, in terms of headache, access to the problem is much more differentiated.
There is:
migraine (with subforms)
tension headache
Cluster headache (Bing-Horton syndrome)
Medication-induced headache
Headache in cervical spine disorders (especially degenerative, C2 syndrome)
Headache after cervical trauma
Glaucoma attack (this can also cause (localized) headaches)
facial pain (trigeminus neuralgia, zoster ophthalmicus, atypical facial pain, etc.)
giant cell arteritis
subarachnoid hemorrhage
sexual headache
Headache in sinusitis
etc.

With tinnitus there is at most pulsed tinnitus and possibly somatic tinnitus, but even these differences do not seem to interest tinnitus specialists...

 

Headache descriptions: Runs across my face here (shows where), Pulsating, in the middle-front-back-side, feels like its going to burst, worse when I shake my head. These are the kinds of things people will say, and then there's the imaging or other diagnostic tools: CT, MRI, angiography, CSF, BP measuring etc. Its the same as with chest pain...there's that description that can often be correlated with objective diagnostic tools to get a more-or-less accurate diagnosis. Tinnitus management is still way behind. The other thing which I alluded to before is that the Medical system does not place an urgency value on tinnitus as it does on things like headache and chest pain.

 

If you ask me, a tonal sound becomes a hiss as you go up in the frequency.

 

Which study?