Middle Ear Damage from Noxious Noise

Can noxious noise damage the middle ear?

I mainly hear about how inner cochlear damage causes hyperacusis pain, but surely there's something wrong with the mid ear as well. Whenever I yawn or burp my tensor tympani feels unnaturally stretched out and flappy. So even if regenerative medicine or various other drugs were effective at treating the inner ear, I assume the mid ear damage would still remain.

Would we have to get our tensor tympani lasered off as well eventually? Or would the mid ear and associated trigeminal nerve somehow repair itself once the type IIs are desensitized?

 

Looks like we’ll find out soon.

https://fundraise.hyperacusisresearch.org/event/2020-hyperacusis-research-benefit-webinar/e312504

Personally I think most if not all middle ear symptoms can be explained by cochlear damage. Could be wrong depending on what is said at this talk.

 

Depends if it caused an acoustic shock or not. But in the case that it did then I'm convinced that it's one half of what sets us up for most of our noxacusis symptoms. (The other half being the cochlea damage, which becomes the actual trigger point for setbacks.)

Read this if you haven't yet, it explains how the middle ear gets damaged with acoustic shock. It appears that the crucial lasting damage is the sensitization of the trigeminal nerve. But I do wonder if the tensor tympani can also be left in a chronically damaged state as well.

An Integrative Model Accounting for the Symptom Cluster Triggered After an Acoustic Shock

 

I have that same issue. Try not to yawn, and if you have to burp, try to do it in your throat so it doesn’t pressurize your ears. Sounds mad but it took me like a year to discover that this actually helps.

 

So by calming down trigeminal nerve, you will calm down the hyperacusis? I’m getting on Pregabalin soon to see if this might work.

 

Of what I tried for noxacusis, Pregabalin seemed to do the most for me but not enough to keep on it. I hate the side effects.

The trouble with this is I think, is that it's the cochlea response to noise that's the root of the problem and that cochlea inflammation takes a really long time to recover from. If the trigeminal is being stimulated by the cochlea nerve endings responding to inflammation inside the cochlea then it's at the mercy of however long it takes for cochlea inflammation to subside. Or if it is a damaged tensor tympanic that triggers inflammation in the middle ear due to its response to a certain noise or frequency then again it's at the mercy of how the cochlea responds to noise in first place. I understand that nerve pain is very hard to treat. I'm just hoping so much that SPI-1005 will do something for it and gets released soon.

 

Yeah what you're saying makes a lot of sense. All the nerves in my head feel inflamed when my tinnitus/hyperacusis is bad. Inflammation is key to the problem.

My trigeminal pain came before my tinnitus/hyperacusis. I get setbacks even without sound, too much alcohol/stress/lack of sleep will do it.

In regards to Pregabalin, what were the side effects? Did you have to up your dose over time? I hear it's good for anxiety? And it also works differently for everyone.

I'm going to try Pregabalin and hope.

 

Yeh good luck with it. I actually did like it for the first few months I was on it. I wasn't on big doses of it, 50 mg I think but it was enough to take the edge off. I think it's important for me to say that I was actually doing reasonably well anyway at the time. I had a second acoustic shock 8 months later, and it just didn't even touch the pain while I was this bad though so I didn't use it because I got no benefit from it plus side effects.

It could be quite a nice effect at first I suppose but I felt quite spaced out on it and unfortunately it's a drug that can make you feel suicidal and kind of detached from reality. Weight gain and blurred vision were a couple more but the main one is that I've read that it can actually cause neuralgia and I'm sure that it kicked off a separate neuralgia for me in my right torso. All the best with it though, I know people can stay on it long term and it can really help them.

 

Yeah, Jaime-Garcia Anoveros has said that cochlear damage can lead to middle ear protective reflexes so I think it's a response to cochlear damage. He also did some experiments a few years ago which showed that the vestibular and trigeminal nuclei do not show a response to noxious noise whereas the Type 2s do. His conclusion was that the response to noxious noise begins in the cochlea and not the middle ear.

However, there's been a lot of interesting research on acoustic shock coming out in the past few years so hopefully we will get more answers soon as we still don't really know the full picture of what's going on.

 

I’m a superstitious person so I always worry about jinxing myself lol but in the name of science I want to point out that I’ve been taking an anti-convulsant and yesterday for about 1 hour or so it did reduce my tinnitus. It took about 3-4 hours for the meds to kick in and there was a distinct moment where I felt it working.

It wasn’t fully gone, but the electrical storm/buzzing reduced by about 80%, as did the loud buzzing sound of metal being cut. I was left with a slight siren sort of sound in one ear and even that felt like it was pushed back. For about an hour, my tinnitus was at about 20% of what it usually is. Not gonna lie, I got a bit emotional because I almost felt normal for a bit.

I do attribute the busy buzzing sounds to a nerve issue of some sort as it’s not an eeeee and literally just sounds like I’m hearing my brain work. Sadly the effects wore off.

It didn’t do much for my facial numbness. It’s not an ideal drug because even at my very low dose I felt like I couldn’t think properly and it took me an hour to get a task done for work that would have otherwise taken me 15 minutes. Pretty severe potential side effects too.

 

What was the drug/dosage? It’s encouraging that you got some effect from it

 

Gabapentin. My current dosage is 100 mg and I am working my way up. I was taking it at night and probably sleeping through the effects so I decided to take it during the day yesterday.

Disclaimer: I am not encouraging the use of this medication without doctor approval. It comes with some pretty serious side effects and there have been people who have reported a worsening in their tinnitus after taking this drug. I have a prescription to address nerve pain but I am linking a study which shows that at 300 mg, it has been shown to be effective to help with acoustic trauma induced tinnitus.

Short-Term Effect of Gabapentin on Subjective Tinnitus in Acoustic Trauma Patients

 

Have you tried L-Theanine? If you are okay with the pushed back siren sound, it might work for you. When I took it, it seemed to lower the static a bit, but then I got the siren sound. Personally, I'd rather have the static, but if yours is really loud you could try the L-Theanine.

 

I haven’t tried this no! Honestly I don’t know if I could handle an increase in the siren sound, mine is already very loud

 

I wonder if some people are just more prone to middle ear issues, since not everyone gets TTTS with an acoustic trauma and some have TTTS without hyperacusis and tinnitus.

I’d hope all these issues calm down eventually after the auditory system gets reset and starts functioning properly.

 

I think that's a response to cochlear damage: the tensors of the middle ear over-reacting to noise.

 

I had a little TTTS that cleared up months ago (and and was very on and off when it was present). Strangely enough this was in my better and less reactive ear.

My other ear, which is more reactive, gets random twitching unrelated to noise. I actually think it's related to a tube problem, as when this happens my ear also feels a bit blocked. This doesn't happen in relation to sound at all, it just comes and goes randomly and sticks around for hours at the time. It feels completely different from what I had in my right ear and again, it's not in response to any noise.

I have no noxacusis or noise sensitivity, just reactive tinnitus. I'm really not sure what's going on with me because I haven't seen a single case like mine at all.

 

It has been a few days and I just wanted to pop in and say that the effect seemed to be a one time thing I’m still taking the same dosage so maybe that’s it. Clearly there’s something there, but my tinnitus levels seem to no longer be lowered by this drug.

 

Middle ear is for sure involved, I really feel like my right ear sounds are not being dampened correctly. And when I heard the sound that led to this, my right ear tightened.