Lenire — Bimodal Stimulation Treatment by Neuromod

I'm starting to fear the same...

Maybe I have scored my tinnitus overly high...

 

Mmhh unless they went alphabetically?

Let’s see, we have until next week in theory.

 

By Ryanair it costs €75 from Frankfurt to Dublin (with return), flying on Tuesday morning and flying back on Wednesday evening.

Considering an overnight stay in a hotel and taxi I would estimate another €150.

4x €225 = €900 in total.

Sounds not sooo bad.

 

Not for life, but until medicine can fix your ears (hair cell regeneration and/or synapse restoration). That means until around 5-10 years.

 

I don't know what to bloody do now. I keep seeing good arguments on both sides of the Lenire coin, and I'm starting to doubt everything. I was feeling quite hopeful and now I'm not. This is really the only thing I have ever considered to do in treating the tinnitus for the past 20 frigging years. What to do what to do

 

Personally I believe their treatment will be helpful for most. What I'm wondering is that if it will actually lower the loudness for most people. From their testimonials, some got the loudness lowered (one had complete remission) and for others they just felt like it made their tinnitus bother them less, as if the machine brought a sort of habituation with it. I'm not too excited for a habituation machine. It could be that they just could've made better testimonials because I saw one of the guys that had a testimonial that seemed like a habituation one, saying he actually had a 17 dB reduction in his tinnitus on Facebook.

Judging by the way it works, the resemblances to the devices that the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota have been working on leads me to believe they are working on the same underlying principle, and thus will likely help most people.

 

I think we shouldn't worry just yet. We should wait until people have actually tried it and tell us whether it works or not and how much of a reduction they had in their tinnitus. I still think for most people it should reduce the tinnitus by at least a bit before they release FX-322 and Regain.

 

We know bimodal stimulation works. The facts are in, and scientific facts don't care about opinions, some people still think the earth is flat despite all the scientific proof we have that the earth is a sphere. What you should say to yourself is that the treatment works for the overwhelming majority. You need to count yourself in the majority.

And even if you're a non responder, it's not like no other treatments aren't coming. We have two similar devices coming out after Lenire.

 

We do?

 

We do.

I would prefer regenerative medicine, but that’s a few years away still.

 

How do we know it works?

 

My concern is that the regeneration of the auditory systems won't be enough for everyone's brains to acknowledge that the hyperactivity causing tinnitus wouldn't be necessary anymore.

If that were to be realized, I believe a definitive cure will more likely come from Dr. Alexander Galazyuk of Northeast Ohio Medical Univeristy , Dr. Timothy Balmer of Oregon Hearing Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University, and/or Dr. Thanos Tzounopoulos' of the University of Pittsburgh's work.

They are all working on finding the source at the cellular and neurotransmitter level. All of their work is somewhat intertwined, I believe if they worked together they could find effective treatments and perhaps a cure in no time.

I've emailed Dr. Galazyuk before, it seems funding is indeed an issue for him. The treatment he has been working on seems very promising too.

 

We have three separate entities that have conducted tests in which the majority saw some form of improvement. And we have trustworthy posters here who have given us their experiences after being in the trials. Some even reporting ‘effective elimination’.

Hubert Lim is working at Neuromod, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t trust them at all. But he belongs to a legitimate institution.

We also know the brain is much more plastic than previously thought, take mindfulness meditation for instance, it actually shrinks the amygdala and enlargens the frontal cortex and hippocampus. By changing the plasticity in the region of the brain creating the tinnitus signal, it only makes sense it will be significantly reduced or in some cases, eliminated (which I wish everyone will get eventually).

I don’t think this treatment is the end all be all, and it certainly isn’t the final solution to tinnitus. At least not for everyone (some people may benefit from different devices out of the three that will eventually release). I’m more or less riding on this to get us to something like FX-322 or CRISPR to fix the root cause of the tinnitus instead of treating the symptom.

 

What other devices? I'm only aware of the one Susan Shore is working on.

 

So indeed the 24th is the release date?

 

I doubt any of the hearing regeneration drugs will help once the tinnitus has started. I have no hearing loss so unless the drugs address the synapses etc, they wouldn’t help me.
Equally how can a local drug (OTO-313?) administered to the inner ear help if it’s a neurological issue widespread in the brain. I think reducing the hyperactivity is the best solution at the moment.

@Hayls32 I’m also a bit skeptical - if Lenire was available in London I would prefer it. I have young kids and going abroad 4 times is not ideal. It would also raise their hopes, whereas if I just slipped into a clinic in London during the school day no one would know...

 

I agree. Most people hear sounds when they are in a silent room and everyone's hearing is affected when they get older. The question is why in some people the sound is amplified and the brain is not able to return to its normal state. I think/hope the Lenire device relaxes the auditory cortex somehow. Maybe by playing sounds and little electric shocks to the tongue the focus on sound is shifted away. If this is the case then the general idea is very similar to mindfulness and CBT, just a different method.

Then again I could be completely wrong.

 

Should everyone participating in this thread all stop and address you now, John? Please. The debate has moved on from whether it works at all over to how much and for whom. There will be those for whom this doesn't work or barely works--but that doesn't invalidate the experiences of those for whom it has helped or will dramatically help.

Please don't killjoy-bomb this thread.

 

It seems like he just wants attention.

 

The University of Minnesota is working on one too. I think they actually were the ones who founded the concept on Guinea pigs.

I still believe the absolute cure will come from the work of those doctors I aforementioned.

 

I think the level of certainty with which some people are asserting that Lenire definitely does work isn't really supported by the evidence so far. We've had a clinical trial run by the Neuromod, in which participants seemed to have positive results, but crucially it wasn't placebo tested.

I wish all the people who purchase Lenire the very best of luck, but from my own point of view I'll want to see a lot more evidence before parting with my cash - and Tinnitus Talk's work in providing a user experience group and survey will be really important for this.

 

By the time Lenire is available to most of us (especially in the US) we should see the first round of testimonials which should suffice for any additional trials they should have done in an ideal world. The nail-biting is really more for those who are within earshot of their office or those who are desperate enough and well-heeled enough to fly out there multiple times.

 

I really admire people who could get Lenire, but they are waiting for the reviews of Tinnitus Talk members.

It's reasonable (and above my strength).

 

Except Neuromod isn’t the only one who’s run trials and tests though. Both Hubert Lim and Dr. Susan Shore have had great success at both their institutions with bimodal stimulation.

 

Just spoke to an American friend of mine on Facebook.

He's had his for 30 years. Severe. He got his call on Friday as well.

 

@Allan1967 - wow is your friend living in the US and going over to Ireland?

 

I would (un)qualifiedly agree. Just been reading up a little on neuroscience so I have to speculate some more, just can't help it, so bear with me

Let's pretend that a dead inner ear hair cell is damaged. All neurons (nerve cells) are by default in a resting state with an internal negative charge on the inputs (dendrites). It seems odd that a dead inner ear hair cell suddenly should start to send emit action potentials and send positive ions out from its axon and upstream to the next neuron towards the brain. That's a first. But let's further pretend that this for some reason is the case.

Then secondly, most of us have experienced that our tinnitus gets intensified when we use our muscles, when we get excited, when our body gets cold, etc. So because of this the malfunction we have acquired must be in a higher level in our neural network (some call it associative layers because they receive inputs from many senses (feature layers).

Thinking in this line perhaps there has been an «overloading» of some sorts (Hebbian learning: what fires together wire together (perhaps)) where some neuron in the associate layers that belong to the auditory functions have formed a dendrite to neuron it shouldn't receive inputs from, e.g., from a neuron that belongs to a circuit responsible for some other bodily functions, motor function or other sensory function.

Thinking of it this way could also explain why tinnitus has such a plurality of symptoms, each person seems to have a different kind of tinnitus with different sounds.

 

Well he hopes to.

 

Judging by the successes of hearing aids and cochlear implants to reduce/eliminate some people's tinnitus, I suspect this will be the case for most.

I believe a more definitive cure will be at the cellular level; I mentioned a few researches on this thread that are working on that. You should look into them, you'll probably like what you find. Especially Timothy Balmer's work into Unipolar Brush Cells.

 

Yes, a few tenths of a second will be much too short to grow a new dendrite with receptors etc. Tendency to more easily get tinnitus when anxious (if this is true, that is) probably also suggests that it has something to do with chemistry in the brain.