New Member — Life Story — Theory — Nerve Fibers & Tinnitus/Hearing Loss — Normal Audiogram?

Hello!

First off I'd like to say it's great to see such a huge community working together to figure out what can be done to not only stop hearing loss but restore it.

I'm 20 years old and have had "hearing loss" and bad tinnitus from an incident with headphones 2 months ago.

(I will attach pictures of my two identical audiograms taken a few months apart tomorrow)


I'd like to apologize for the length of this post but it's necessary for me to talk about all this because of how much hearing has been involved in my life and to get my message across to you. Please read this post all the way through and try your best to connect everything together. I bolded all the major points of what I'm typing out to give you an easier job of reading through all this. Again, I apologize for its length, but there is a lot of backstory to this and what has happened.

I've done some researching online for a month and a half and would absolutely love it if you guys could read all the way through this and read the articles included at the bottom of this post because I truly feel like I've put two and two together in a theory with a certain type of noise-induced hearing loss that many of you may have unless you were born with hearing loss/deafness.

Now many of the things I'm about to talk about in this post are all based off how I've felt these past months, connections I've made through articles I've found online, and some deep thinking about how my hearing has been every day since the incident.

My Life leading Up to My Hearing Problem

Before I get into to how I got this hearing loss/tinnitus and the symptoms I have, I'd like to talk about what I've been involved with ever since I was a wee-little boy. Music has always been a passion for me. I remember buying my first cd ever in 2nd grade, it was Linkin Park's Reanimation Remix album. I had no idea who they were but I thought the artwork was very cool so I purchased it. That's the first time I can recall from my memory that I fell in love with listening to music. Fast forward to when I'm an 8th grader. I started a band playing the drums with two other friends where we only played one show but it was something that opened up a new horizon for me. I attended my first ever rock concert, it was a Wolfmother show, with a few friends the next year. Thinking back, that was the first time I really noticed Tinnitus. At that show, I remember we were standing right directly in front of the speakers the whole time. When we walked out from that show my ears were ringing so loudly and the ringing didn't stop until about 4-5 days after.

Aside from attending rock concerts throughout the later years of my life, I also joined another band that started my Sophmore year of high school and ended the summer before I became a Freshman in college. This band really took up a good majority of time those years. I'd have to say that we must of practiced together over hundreds of times and played close to a hundred shows as a band. Throughout that time I didn't protect my hearing until about half way through. I actually don't remember the reason why I started protecting my ears when practicing and playing shows but I ended up purchasing some hi-quality earplugs to use. All through this time of practicing and playing shows I never noticed any Tinnitus or hearing loss but I'm absolutely sure it was provoking the start of what I have now.

Also aside from attending rock concerts and playing in a band, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to music as talked about previously. I really started listening to music a lot, besides starting up a band, when I was a Sophmore in high school. I would listen to music while doing homework, I would listen to music while doing household activities (mowing the lawn, vacuuming, folding towels), I would listen to music every time I was driving my car, and I would even just sit in my room all day listening to music. I would even listen to songs and drum along to them at home as practice and because I really enjoyed to do it. Listening to music was something I could do that made me feel like I was exploring the unknown and learning something new everyday. It really gave me the ability to feel good about the future and think about the possibilities in life. I could even say that I think I was addicted to listening to music. Never once during these times did I notice a drastic change in my hearing. I never blasted the music in my ears during this time but I did listen to music for long periods of time.

Fast forward to my Freshman year of college. I was not playing in the band I was before, only jamming a few times with my fellow bandmate at his house while wearing ear protection. I attended only a few rock concerts and I wore ear protection to these shows. I also invested in some very high-quality in ear headphones by Shure that are a lot safer to use than Apple headphones because you don't have to blast them in your ear to get a nice sound. I continued to listen to music a lot during this time through these headphones and never noticed any change in my hearing. Fast forward to my Sophmore year of college. This was when I became very involved with the Audio Production side of music. I was attending Western Michigan University at the time and was looking to major in audio engineering, was taking music classes, and had started recording my own music with the recording equipment I obtained the summer after my Freshman year of college. At school I lived in a big apartment (it was basically a house) that allowed me to have all my recording equipment and instruments set up in its basement so that I could record and jam with my roommates any time I wanted to. I protected my hearing anytime we jammed but still listened to a lot of music through headphones while either doing homework or walking to school.

The last two weeks before my Sophmore year of college ended were when I started to notice a change in my hearing. I own good quality studio monitors that I record with and also listen to music with so I don't alway have to have headphones in. During those two weeks I started to notice a change in what I thought was frequency while listening to songs through these monitors. I noticed a difference in the high end or high frequency sound of the songs where I couldn't pick it up as well as before. At this point I was not worrying about my hearing at all because I was still feeling fine and could still hear the music fine. Fast forward to last summer. I've come home for the summer, I'm still recording music, playing the drums at home, and listening to music through headphones. About halfway through summer I realized I was having difficulty hearing the music I was listening to through the in-ear headphones I had been using for years. I could still hear the music playing but something was off and I was not sure what it was at the time. During last summer I was actually very aware of hearing loss at the time and was doing what I could to protect my hearing to the best of my ability. I stopped wearing the Shure in-ear headphones and purchased a pair of high-quality Sony Extra Bass over-the-ear headphones (which I have now learned is much safer than in-ear headphones when listening to music). I had a scare during the summer where I thought I did lose a good bit of my hearing but it ended up just being a huge piece of earwax blocking my ear canal. I went to a local ENT who helped remove it and got an audiogram done by an Audiologist right next door to the ENT. The audiogram showed I had excellent hearing, much better than most people have.

The summer progressed and I continued recording music with the slight notice of the high end change that happened during the last two weeks of my Sophmore year of college. The biggest change was I developed a small amount of constant ringing in my ears that didn't bother me that much because I still was feeling fine with my hearing. Fast forward to my Junior year of college that started about 3 months ago. Everything was going great, I had really figured out what I had a passion for which was audio production and even video production and wanted to make a career out of it in the end. The first two weeks of the school year ended and everything was looking fine. I could still listen to music through my studio monitors which still had a good quality sound, I could still hear music quite well through my over-the-ear headphones, and I was feeling optimistic about my future with music and a career I was really excited to get into.

THE HEARING CHANGE

Here is where things changed and my hearing became much worse. I have always made sure to be a healthy person and exercise whenever I could. Whenever I would workout, I would listen to music. I had been working out at the school's rec center the two weeks before hand and had been using my over-the-ear headphones but I was getting tired of having such a big bulky thing on my head while trying to exercise. It was the middle of the third week of the school year, Sept. 16th, when I decided it'd be nice to go back to my in-ear Shure headphones because they don't get in the way of working out at all. So I did, and exercised for close to an hour. The quality of the music playing in the headphones was not that great and I didn't really think it was that much of a problem during that time. I was not completely blasting the music either, I had the music at 60% on my Iphone and the in-ears being used does not play the music as loud as cheaper in-ear phones do. The rest of the day went well and I had a good night sleep.

I woke up the next morning and noticed a change in my hearing. The ringing in my ears that was barely there before was now 10x worse, I had muffled hearing, and my hearing was extremely sensitive to loud noises. It was bad. At the time, I was asking myself what in the world could of caused this and there no way in heck that it was my headphones that caused this problem. Nothing sounded the same anymore. The cars going by my apartment didn't sound the same, the room I sat in didn't sound the same, and the T.V. didn't sound the same. I tried listening to music through my studio monitors but I could barely listen to it without the ringing getting worse in my ears and the sound becoming jumbled. I became very afraid at this point that I had completely ruined my hearing so I frantically searched online for ways to heal your hearing or ways to bring it back to normal. I couldn't find anything except hearing aids, cochlear implants, or supplements that made a difference with your hearing. I decided that the supplements were worth partaking in and I purchased Vitamin A, C, E, Folic Acid, Magnesium, Beta Carotene, and B-12. I was most interested in the B-12 supplement because of what I had read online on how it's great for keeping your nervous system healthy and great for your hearing. My hearing was still not the same the next few days. About close to a week after my hearing loss occurred I decided to try the B-12 supplement to see if it would do anything for my hearing. I took one pill of the B-12 during the middle of the day (it was 2500 mcg, so a good amount) before my Film class that I was taking. I have to say it made me feel good the few minutes after I took it. I walked into my Film class about a half hour later and sat down to watch the movie which was planned to be shown that day. The movie was a French animated movie from 2007 that had beautiful music correlated with it and this is when I noticed something different. The ringing had gone down in my ears, the muffling of my ears had basically gone down, and I could clearly hear and feel the music that was playing from the movie through the speakers in the room. It was like a miracle and I could not believe how good I was feeling from realizing what was happening. My hearing problem had basically vanished right there and I thought I had saved my hearing. I went back to my apartment later that day and things were sounding like they were before the incident with my headphones. I played my acoustic guitar which sounded great, I could clearly hear noises outside my apartments open window, and even the music sounded like before on my studio monitors, maybe even better than before!

The next day the ringing came back, the muffled hearing had subsided a good bit, and my hearing went back to the problem it was before. I took B-12 again that day and my hearing returned to near normal again. Music especially just sounded great again. Everything was okay until later that day when the smoke alarm went off in my apartment kitchen after cooking some food. The sensitivity of my ears were still not back to normal from the headphone incident and boy did that alarm hurt my hearing. Now mind you I was living in a very tiny apartment at this time with wooden floors and nothing to absorb the sound from the smoke alarms so this alarm was very loud. I didn't have the reaction to cover my ears but to try and reset the alarm as quick as I could. I had nothing protecting my ears when I did this and it took me about 45 seconds, maybe more, to finally get it to stop making noise. After this I noticed that my hearing was shot. My ears were ringing terribly and I had lost the feeling that I had before after taking the B-12 that day. At the time I was listening to some Spotify through a Bose bluetooth small speaker I have but when I went back to listening to the music, it didn't sound the same. Something was off again.

Weeks passed and my hearing still did not improve, in fact it got worse. The muffling of the hearing was gone but the sensitivity was worse, the ringing was worse, and I just could not hear as well as before. I had to stop listening to music, I couldn't recording music anymore. I just could not focus on the sounds I was hearing and I was not feeling the same as I was before any of this ever happened. Things went downhill from there and I started to do poorly in my classes at school and began to get into a depression. About a month went by and I just could not continue at school so I ended up going back home to get away from the stress and to figure things out for the life I was going to live with the problem I was having. I tried to continue taking B-12 and all the other supplements along with it but my hearing never went back to how it was those two days when I first took the B-12 supplement. My hearing didn't improve at all through out this time and I believe it has gotten worse even up to today, November 16th, 2015.


Now don't stop reading from here because this is actually where the CONNECTIONS start to happen and how my life story ENORMOUSLY RELATES to my HEARING LOSS!

On October 1st, before I had come home for good from school, I visited the local Audiologist again back at home I had gone to during the summer. I was able to see the Audiologist again after taking a train home from school for the weekend. I explained to the Audiologist what had happened with the headphone incident and how confused I was on how I could of possibly gotten this hearing loss. We went through some possibilities and came up with maybe I had lost hair cells in my ears from playing the headphones to loudly (which didn't make sense but could of possibly happened). After I took a hearing test just like during the summer and what happened? There was basically NO DIFFERENCE in this Audiogram from the last Audiogram I took. None at all. Maybe just the teeny-tiniest change but it was nothing. How could I feel such a huge change in my hearing from now back to my hearing in the summer when it was completely fine except some very slight ringing? That doesn't make any sense at all.


Moving on to a few weeks ago

It wasn't until about a few weeks ago when I really started to focus in on how my hearing was at the time, information I could find on hearing loss, and what could be done to fix this problem I have because in the end I wanted my hearing back as closely as possible to the way it was before.

I did all I could to find out about how the ear works and the damages that can be done to it. All this time I truly believed I had damaged a bunch of hair cells in my ears and was never going to get them back. I did research on treatments being done to regenerate hair cells or repair damaged hair cells. I looked everywhere to find answers. I looked into Gene Therapy, I looked into Stem Cell Treatments, I looked into any kind of drug being developed to regrow hair cells. I would spend every moment of every day these past few weeks trying to find new information on regrowing hair cells because I was becoming so nervous that I had damaged my hair cells for good and would never be able to get them back to how they were before. It wasn't until I came across this article -( http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...den-hearing-loss-risk-study-article-1.2230945 )- that really changed my outlook on my "hearing loss" and the symptoms I was having from it. In the article, researchers of Harvard Medical School Eaton Peabody Laboratory claim that you can lose up to 90% of the nerve fibers in your ears without losing the ability to detect a tone in quiet. But once background noise is introduced, hearing ability drops dramatically. So, Hair Cells may be completely intact but hearing still lost if the nerve synapses are damaged. This got me to thinking. So there are nerves that connect from your ears to the brain that are not hair cells? That was a bit of relief for me giving me hope that maybe I didn't destroy my hair cells from the incident I had with my headphones. From this article I started my quest on finding some answers on "nerve fibers" in the ears.

I actually had a tough time finding more information about nerve damage in the ear and if I did find information it was usually an article needed to be purchased or a code needed to view the whole thing. But another concept had popped in my head that I wanted to figure out. If someone like myself has a "Normal Audiogram" and I have ringing in my ears, then what could be the problem? Tinnitus and a Normal Audiogram is what I looked into. I found three good articles on this idea that gave a great explanation to what could be wrong. In this first article -(http://www.tinnitus.org.uk/tinnitus-and-hidden-hearing-loss)- we are told that there are people who have normal audiograms but who still have ringing in the ears. The focus lies on what's called the "Hearing Thershold". We have always thought that if your Audiogram Test is normal then your Hearing Threshold must be normal. If you read the article it talks about tests being done on humans and the use of a testing system called "ABR" or Auditory Brain Response. This test determines the electrical activity generated by the first processing stages of the auditory system. I'm not going to explain all the other info on what's tested because you need to read through the article. I will say that through a testing done on mice after exposure of night club sound levels (2 hours at 100 dB SPL) there was a temporary shift of the hearing threshold that recovered to normal levels within days, but there was a permanent reduction of the amplitude of wave I....and it goes on talking about how its similar to a test done before on the group of humans. But the article goes on to say that the after close inspection of the inner ears of the mice, there was a large fraction of their auditory nerve fibers that had lost contact to the hair cells in the cochlea. They continue to say that this is like unplugging half the cables between an array of microphones and the sound recorder. The mice had retained just enough auditory nerve fibres to still be able to hear soft sounds, but the loss of contact between many auditory nerve fibres and the hair cells meant that for loud sounds, much fewer fibres were responding, thus reducing the total output of the auditory nerve. BIG NEWS RIGHT HERE.

(Here is the article continued):

How such ‘hidden hearing loss’ can lead to tinnitus can be directly understood with the help of our computer model. As a large fraction of the auditory nerve fibres no longer respond to sound, the overall signal from the auditory nerve is decreased, and therefore the nerve cells in the auditory brain receive less input and become less active overall. When these nerve cells then try to get their mean activity back up to the healthy target level, they increase their response gain and respond more vigorously to incoming signals.

This increased gain could also be seen in our human ABR data, as the amplitude of wave V was normal in the tinnitus group even though wave I (the input signal) was smaller than normal. However, a side-effect of the gain increase is an amplification of neuronal noise, which gives rise to increased spontaneous activity of the nerve cells – the model develops tinnitus.
BOOM.

This gives me the notion that a good majority of you that have tinnitus had to of damaged the nerve fibers in your inner ears and not the hair cells in your ears. If you have a near normal audiogram or even a little below it and seem to have hearing loss and loud ringing in your ears then this will apply directly to you but if not then your hair cells must have been damaged in whatever noise-induced incident happened to you.

Research is continued:

This was where I continued to find more connections to the past symptoms I was having. Here is an article -(http://www.hear-it.org/loud-music-damages-nerves-brain)- Loud music you play through your headphones, which is just loud noise (noise levels above 110 decibels), damages the nerves connected to the brain just like Multiple Sclerosis. The sound waves enter the ear and eventually reach the nerves connected to the hair cells in the inner ear and strip these nerve fibers of their insulation that covers them called the "myelin sheath". Now it talks about in the article that over time the myelin sheath grows back but when you think about it, if you have continuously listened to loud music, attended loud concerts, have had a job where you're bombarded by loud noise, then how is the myelin sheath supposed to grow back? From this online source and other online sources I've read, scientists say the myelin sheath or nerves grow back 1mm a day meaning hearing can recover. Now think back to the article you just read above this. Hearing does recover but the Hearing Threshold does not and the nerves are still disconnected or have died from the loud noise over time unless it regrows back fast enough before you do any more damage.

Connection to my hearing loss two months ago:

Remember me talking about when I took the B-12 2500 mcg supplement two days in a row about a week after my headphone incident? If you need me to refresh your memory, B-12 is great for the nervous system and any disorders you have with it. Better yet, B-12 actually helps regrow the Myelin Sheath on nerves to keep a strong connection going! Now remember I said that after taking the B-12 both days, it felt like I got my hearing almost fully back? Well I must of been able to repair the lost nerve connections that happened with my hearing loss through the B-12 by building the myelin sheath back up. But when the smoke alarm went off in my apartment after the 2nd straight day of taking the B-12, my nerves must of been damaged even more from the loud noise of the alarm and from there they must of lost even further connection or the neuron died right then and there.

From that day to now (Novemember 16th, 2015) I still have not been able to re-establish a strong connection of my nerves to my inner ear hair cells because I have yet to feel and hear like I could when I took the B-12 those two days in a row after the incident.

The connections continue:

After figure everything out above, I dove more deeply into the shifting of Hearing Thresholds for people with hearing loss. The first article I brought up above all this talking about the "Earbud Increases Hidden Hearing Loss", states that when people who have a hidden hearing loss are introduced to background noise, their hearing capabilities dramatically drop. I tested this out for myself and paid very close attention to how I could hear things when noises very involved in the background. I first noticed a huge difference in my hearing abilities with background noise when I went out to eat at a restaurant for my Uncle's Birthday dinner. I had an extremely hard time focusing in on conversations going on because of not only noises happening all around the restaurant but even the conversations going on at the dinner table. I struggled to hear someone speaking to me that was an arms length away from me. I could hear and keep a conversation up but the struggle I now had with all this was never ever there before this incident. This got me to thinking. What is really considered background noise? Is it just noise that our brains to focus in on while performing other tasks or is it just considered noise that is louder than any other noise in the room?

Connection between Background Noise & Music:

I first starting making a connection between background noise and music when I was trying to listen to the radio in the car while out driving at home not to long ago. A song came on "Say it Ain't So by Weezer," that I had heard millions of times before in the past through headphones and speakers. There was something completely different with the song though. The low bass guitar was completely overwhelming my hearing and flooding out the rest of the song. I could still hear the vocals but it seemed like the electric guitars in the song were barely there. Why was this happening? Well here is how I put it. You can look at music almost like background noise in a restaurant. Certain frequencies in songs are louder than others. If you did not know, low frequencies give off the loudest noise and can travel for farther distances than mid or high frequencies. Think of when people play hip hop music in their cars or inside somewhere. What do you most notably hear if they have a good speaker system? The BASS or LOW END!! This is what our ears can most certainly pick up and it relates to background noises because a background noise can be a loud noise that is louder or more distinguishable than other noises around it. So why is the bass guitar now sticking out so much for me when I listen to songs through a stereo system? I believe the brain focuses on whatever sound is the loudest heard. When you listen to a song, all the different instruments playing can be thought of as background noise and talking to someone at a restaurant. If you are trying to focus on let's say the drums playing then any of the other instruments playing in the song will be like background noise. Your brain is focusing on the drums and automatically tuning out all the other instruments playing.

There is where Nerve Fibers come into play again

I found another article about the inner ear that included a section focused on hidden hearing loss and what it's all about. The article -(http://hyperacusisfocus.org/innerear/)- if you scroll down to the section titled "Hidden Hearing Loss" the second paragraph states that each Inner Hair Cell is connected to roughly 10 nerve fibers that react to different loudness levels. It also talks about (like explained before) that losing these nerve fibers will not show up on a hearing test as long as lower loudness fibers remained intact. The article continues to talk about the different thresholds related to nerve fibers and how higher loudness level nerves are more susceptible to damage than the lower loudness level nerves. Relating to music and how the lower end really sticks out to me now. The article also explains how these nerve fibers relate to hyperacusis and how the brain turns up the gain so that it can reach normal hearing levels again.

There is one more article I'd like to link you to that shows laboratory work done on the cochlea. The 2nd to last paragraph of this article states that after several-post exposures have been done to an animal being studied and their inner ear was looked at through a microscopic structure, there was a 50% loss of synaptic connections between hair cells and neurons within 1 day after exposure. This connects to when I used the B-12 close to a week after the incident. The supplement must of somehow reconnected the lost synapses to whatever hair cells it got disconnected from.


Summary

- Tinnitus sufferers with normal hearing have lost a majority of their nerve fibers connected to the hair cells in their ears

- Those who have lost a good amount of their nerve fibers have difficulty hearing with background noise

- Noise-induced hearing loss incidents involves a good amount of their nerve fibers disconnecting and not always the loss of hair cells

- Headphones damage the nerves like Multiple Sclerosis

- Headphones can make you lose up to 90% of your nerve fibers

- B-12 could possibly help your nerve fibers if disconnected from noise-induced trauma




Present day:

i hope you guys were able to follow along with everything I put together in this post. I apologize again for how long it was but I really had to type all this out to explain everything that has happened to me and how these connections can help you guys out too.

As of right now I'm set to see an Audiologist and ENT at The University of Michigan where I will explain to them the interesting sources I've found and how it all connects to the hearing loss I have. I have not had anymore signs of recovery in my hearing and I believe it has actually gotten worse since two months ago. I hope to be able to take an ABR test at U of M and even a test called a DPOAE, but I'm not sure if they have those tests so I plan to call soon to make sure they do. If not then I'll search for other routes.

I've attachd a jpg. of an example of nerve fibers damaged from noise. Here is the websites url too -(http://www.hearingreview.com/2014/0...anism-nerve-fiber-loss-discussed-asa-meeting/)-

If you guys have any questions feel free to message me on this site or comment down below.

Thanks again for reading all of this

- Nick

 

Hidden hearing loss (nerve damage really) is definitely getting more attention nowadays. Reversing this kind of damage might be less difficult than growing hair cells back.

 

Thanks for commenting @Nucleo. I've been struggling to find companies/pharmaceuticals that are working on regrowing the auditory nerve fibers back to hair cells or in other words reconnecting the ribbon synapses. All I've found so far are a few articles talking about discoveries made by researchers showing that it is possible to regrow them back together but you only have so long to do so.

Here is a company that I believe is in the process of reconnecting nerves to hair cells through age-related hearing loss

http://www.otonomy.com/pipeline/oto-4xx/


Here are a few articles:

(This one talks about regrowing nerve fibers back and helping them survive through nt-3 a neurotrophin)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/scientists...-triggering-genes-produce-nt3-protein-1471143

(I'm not sure if they were able to reconnect the synapses in this study but were able to regrow the auditory nerve back and there were signs of fibers growing out with synapses on them through the use of a cochlear implant, gene therapy, and electrical impulses)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/275923.php

(This one talks about the use of HESC to repair the connection between the brain and the ear)
http://www.nature.com/news/human-embryonic-stem-cells-restore-gerbil-hearing-1.11402

(This one is through the use of Brain-Derived Nuerotrophic Factors? I guess it's a different kind of gene therapy?)

http://www.sysnatura.com/longchamp-...d-fiber-sprouting-in-deaf-pou4f3-mutant-mice/

 

Ketosis can treat multiple sclerosis by enhancing mitochondrial energy efficiency. And I am on it right now.

 

@joseph Ghass I'll have to look into that. I'm not sure if you read the post correctly but I don't have actual Multiple Sclerosis, but just what headphones and loud noises do to the nerve fibers in our ears connected to each hair cells acts like Multiple Sclerosis on nerves in the body by stripping away the myelin sheath and damaging them over time if not careful enough. Thanks for the advice though, I'll look more into Ketosis.

Do you see any improvements from being on Ketosis? Is it safe for everyone to be on this diet?

 

Welcome Nick. Your initial post has got to be one of the most detail and technical introductory posts of any TT members. You obviously have a lot to offer us on your knowledge of what is happening inside the nerve and the hair cells. I think @attheedgeofscience may be the notable member here who can have an intelligent discussion with you on the subject.

On the B12, you mention taking the dosage of 2500 mcg. I look at the multi-vitamin for guys over 50 I take and it only has a meager 75 mcg. What is the usual dosage people take as a tinnitus supplement? Is 2500mcg safe?

 

If you want to get on a specific diet, safest to speak to your doctor before undertaking it. There is no medical evidence to show that any diet will improve your tinnitus beyond anecdotes. otherwise, everyone on this site would be on it yesterday. and it would have long since been on the cover of every major US newspaper.

 

Hello Nick. I am also new to this forum but not new to hearing loss and tinnitus. I also went to audiologist and ENT at U of M. Please let me know about the outcome of your visit there.

 

@billie48 Thank you very much. I'm just determined to do whatever I can to get us closer to finding out what causes these problems and what can be done even though we don't have the equipment or procedures to do so. There is so much information at our fingertips online that it's just basically like a puzzle when trying to get to the bottom of something. I've read some of Attheedgeofscience's posts and I was very fascinated by them. I'll make sure to contact them soon.

As for the dosage of B-12. I've read online that you can never really take to much B-12. I've read people taking more than 2500 mcg a day and not having any problems. It basically will just give you energy like an energy drink does or caffeine. I personally would not go past 2500 mcg because it is a lot more than what is included in your average Multi-Vitamin. I don't really recall why I picked that amount of a supplement but I think when I bought it at Walmart it was the 2nd to highest dosage you could get so I thought it would work well.

Now I have not found any studies saying B-12 helps your Tinnitus, but from what happened about a month and a half ago with my hearing and how it had of reconnected some the damaged nerve fiber synapses in my inner ears shows that it does help out the nerves in your ears somehow. I don't know exactly what it does right down to the bone but it has brought down my Tinnitus the past weeks I've taken it hoping that I'll be able to fix the nerves again in my ears just like the two days in a row about a week after the incident I had.

Now not to get off topic in the reply but how have you been living with your Tinnitus/Hearing Loss? Ever since this has happened I've been struggling to make it through each day. Music and hearing was HUGE in my life coming up to this problem that occurred, I mean absolutely huge. I have always been a sensitive person who was very attached to their feelings and music and my hearing gave me those feelings in the best way possible. It seems like now, even though I still have "normal hearing" (do your best job of performing big finger quotation marks when reading normal hearing) I have lost the sensation I would get from hearing and listening to music. I've created my own little name for what Tinnitus really is for people who have it. I call it Hearing Paralysis. You can compare it to someone who is paralyzed in the leg or the spine. They have lost the nerves in those areas through injury/trauma which causes them to not be able to have any sensation from it or be able to move it. When someone have Tinnitus, they have lost a good amount of nerves connected to the hair cells in their inner ears. I mean, I'm not really sure if people have realized how vitally important hearing is to our health. Hearing is strongly connected to our mood. You hear a song you like, what do you feel? You feel better, you feel happy. You hear a family members voice you love, what do you feel? Same thing, you feel comfort, you feel good to be around a loved one. I believe hearing loss is linked to heart disease too? I really don't know how people who are have moderate to severe hearing loss or especially people who are completely deaf can be so strong and live their lives to the fullest when they are missing such a key sense in their life, it's absolutely amazing.

I'm sorry for the little extra paragraph above it's just something extra I really wanted to add. I'm just having very depressive symptoms from my incident. I'm actually going to see a Neurologist today hoping they could figure out what chemical imbalances are going on in my head.

 

@eric peterson That would be a very smart decision. It would not be safe at all to start the diet without a consent from your doctor especially if you have had other health issues in the past. I actually had an incident over the summer where my heart went completely out of beat and I had to be given Cardizem through an IV at the hospital to slow it down back into place. I have very small palpitations every now and then.

 

@Lorac Hello,

How did your visit go with them? Did you just get an Audiogram done and sat down and talked with the ENT? I'll make sure to let you know the answers I get back from them when I go on the 25th.

 

Hello Nick,

The informations you gathered here are really interesting, I've never heard of that before (not a long time T sufferer though).

I may be in a situation close to yours (no hearing loss up until 8khz, not tested above sadly) although my trauma comes fromes diving.

Please keep up the good work and keep us updated on how it goes for you !

 

Unfortunately, they were unable to help me at U of M. They told me to learn to live with it. I have a profound loss in one ear, happened suddenly a couple of years ago. I agree with you that this is a problem with nerves. I can feel it. I feel the tinnitus and I feel noise in my deaf ear with every sound in my good ear. I was also a musician so I understand your sadness.
I am hoping you have better results at U of M. One thing I do believe....they will figure out better treatments in the near future. Younger minds will figure things out. Meanwhile, I am learning to live it.

 

@GrosBalou Thanks for finding my thread interesting. I strongly believe that it's not only what is wrong with my hearing but it also has to be for many other people including you. Can you explain what happened in your diving incident to me?

 

@Lorac I'm really sorry to hear that. It's really sad that U of M, being such a huge contributing factor in the search to cure hearing loss, can only tell you to shrug it off. Anything is possible in this world and there will one day be a cure for hearing loss but we just don't know when.

If I may ask, what exactly were you involved with as a musician? What instrument did you or still play?

I hope to have good results at U-of-M too. I'm not expecting much but I'm going to basically give them a big summary of everything I put down in this post. I agree with you immensely that there will be better treatments in the future. There are many pharmaceuticals working on this and it's great to see that. It's just the wait and not knowing when exactly they'll be ready that gets to you.

 

I played the oboe, mainly as a hobby. I no longer play but I have kept my oboe and I might play again some day....who knows? My hearing loss was probably caused by a virus though, not noise exposure. My adult daughter also plays the oboe and so it lives on.
The ENT did tell me to avoid caffeine and other stimulants and that does seem to help. I also do better with good sleep and trying to keep stress levels down. I think I will habituate better over time. Moderately quiet hobbies are a good treatment for me...reading novels, gardening, ping pong, billiards (in my basement, not a noisy bar). These produce endorphins and help me ignore the noise and discomfort.

 

I had troubles equalizing pressure in my ears and I really likely overdid the Valsalva maneuver. What I did was like a small blast in the inner ear. (I contracted a cold at the end of the day as well, which would explain the troubles to equalize)
The tinnitus came on the next day.

PS : I'll try that B12 supplement as well, we never know.

 

After taking a teaspoon of liquid b12 my tinnitus goes really low

 

Thanks for the concern. I went through hell with my ultra high pitch dog whistle T which was soon followed by severe hyperacusis. H turned all normal sounds piercingly hurtful to the senses. But worse, being that I suffered anxiety and panic disorder for decades before T & H, these two alien beasts just opened the flood gate of hell of relentless anxiety and panic attacks, from the moment I got waken up by loud T most mornings. When you add all the terrible symptoms together, life became quite unbearable. I was depressed and desperate as well as sleepless. That was a dark, dark time of my life and I never thought I could survive the sufferings.

But never say never. Today I live a normal and absolutely enjoyable life. I wrote my success story like many members and I listed the important points or strategies which have helped me turned around. If you like to know about them, for brevity here is the link to my success story. Take great care of yourself and God bless.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...w-i-recovered-from-tinnitus-hyperacusis.3148/

You may also want to check out the most read success story on TT, the Back To Silence method by IWLM as it is very simple and effective method to follow.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/back-to-silence.7172/

 

Thank you for such a detailed post. I went to ENTs at Johns Hopkins and George Washington, and other than prescribing some meds, I was told to just live with it. I was hoping for a little more insight or treatment than that. I was also told I have tinnitus without hearing loss, but I know I have hearing loss. They just don't check all frequencies. After five months of very loud tinnitus in both ears, I find that I went from noticing it 100% of the time to maybe 80% of the time. I am hoping that the brain will continue to ignore it more and more as time goes on.

 

@Mark A You're welcome. I really hate having to read that you went through that with just being told to live with it. What we have is not something that can be easily lived with and accustomed to. I think there is something even deeper to Tinnitus than studies have found. Tinnitus has to be the loss of nerves in our ears. Not hair cells but the nerves that connect our ear to our brain. I had a third audiogram done Wednesday of this week at the University of Michigan. My "normal hearing" is almost identical to the past two audiograms I took, one in June of last summer and one in October. There is no way my hearing is normal. There are just so many factors that are physically different with my hearing it's not even funny. Trust me, I listened, played, and produced music which was the most valued part of my life so I know what is exactly wrong with my hearing and I know for a fact my hearing is not healthy. I've been in the worst depression ever from it and there's nothing I can do to get out of it because it has to be a chemical imbalance. I've never felt like this in my life, it's awful.

This post goes for everyone else on this Thread. Read these articles too.

http://www.healthyhearing.com/report/51881-Is-hearing-loss-connected-to-your-mood

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20...hearing-loss-and-communications-problems.aspx

 

@billie48 I apologize for taking so long to reply back on this thread but I have finally been able to sit down and read your amazing post about your T & H. I'm very encouraged by your words as for right now I'm suffering. My hearing has changed for the worst I would say since a month and a half ago. The ringing has not gotten worse but it seems like the gain has been turned up in my brain and any sound exhausts me now. I have trouble falling asleep now, I wake up fatigued, I go through the day tired and unmotivated, and any loud sound jolts me. I know how my hearing was before any of this ever happened and last year I was feeling on top of the world. I was able to do the things I loved the most that involved music and now I just don't have any passion for it. There are just so many little things that are different with my hearing now that I can just tell something is wrong and I don't have normal hearing. I know I damaged the nerves in the ears because all three of the audiogram tests I've taken show up with the same frequencies all the way through as if I have great hearing.

I wish I could be like you billie and be able to cope with the problems I'm having right now but there was this deep connection I had with my hearing that I don't even feel like myself anymore. I try so hard everyday to feel good and be happy but life is just a huge struggle now. I'm hoping things look brighter in the next couple of months but I just don't see it every happening.

Should I just stay as positive as I can about everything and try to keep moving forward? My thoughts are very negative now a days and it's hard to be positive. I definitely need to see a therapist soon from this because it's to much of a struggle everyday. Your hearing is something you can't really get away from too so you have to deal with it every single second!

 

I'd like to update everyone on how my visit to the University of Michigan went on Wednesday and my MRI I had yesterday.

When I first arrived at the Otolaryngology Department at U of M I signed in and filled out any paperwork that was needed to be filled out. It wasn't long before I was escorted into a booth where they performed the audiogram test. I can easily that one of the tests done hurt my hearing even more. It was some sort of loud high pitched testing for I think the ear drum to see if it was working properly? After the audiogram test I then had my blood pressure tested and was escorted into the room where I met an ENT. I described all my symptoms to the ENT and gave her all the articles I had researched and printed up so she had a better idea of what I think (more like know) is wrong with my hearing. She did not provide me with much information on what I thought was wrong with my hearing but was able to show me that I had a rare disorder in my right ear. The ENT saw this through a Ct Scan I provided her and had gotten done at a hospital nearby my house because of a sinus infection I had when my hearing incident happened. This rare disorder is called Superior Semicircular Canal Dehiscence Syndrome (SSCD). It has something to do with a bone in your inner ear being to thin which causes all sorts of symptoms. Now I know that this has nothing to do with the problems I have right now because what I have now started right after the headphone incident I had. I have had problems with my right ear where every time I lay down on my bed there is a throbbing heartbeat sound in my ear so that has to be part of the disorder.

The best outcome of this visit to U of M was that I was able to has the ENT give me a reference for having an ABR and DPOAE test done next month. I hope to see great results from these two tests because these will show a deeper level to my hearing than the audiogram test does.

I had an MRI done yesterday because of the depression I'm in and what I believe to be a chemical imbalance because of how terrible I feel everyday from my hearing problem. The MRI took about a half hour to do and the worst part about it was that the machine was incredibly loud. It did not help my hearing at all and I hope it didn't do anymore damage to my hearing nerves although so far I haven't experienced anything bad yet. This MRI should display any problems I'm having in the brain and I believe it also can show part of my auditory nerve?

I hope to piece together this awful puzzle I've been given and one day can get at least some part of my hearing back.

 

I think that is the best approach when the T is new or relatively new. Your ears/hearing may take some time to settle down, and your body needs time to adjust to the 'new normal' to learn to flow with it. Resisting something we can't control much will generate fierce emotional storm to the body, and the emotional pains are manifested in anxiety, panic, depression, sleeplessness & lack of energy or enthusiasm. That is what I have been saying to newer sufferers, to try to adjust, adapt and to accept the new normal, whatever the case is, especially if it is beyond your control. In the following post, you can see how a doctor with T will learn to accept the new normal and adjust. Hopefully, when we learn to accept the new normal, the stress and anxiety level will go down, and then T will be easier to handle.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/curing-tinnitus.4136/page-5#post-40854

 

Hello @nick,
Thanks for the update on your U of M visit. I'm glad that they are trying to help you. SSCD is something that can be corrected with surgery, I believe. It's great that they are doing further testing with you.
There are so many musicians on this site. Makes me wonder if it is just harder for our brains to reorganize after a hearing loss. Maybe those pathways in our brains are more active and developed, making the adjustment tougher for us.
Anyway, please do seek help from a therapist. I understand your fear and sadness and I want you to feel better. Hang in there and keep us posted.

 

@Lorac I think that easily has to be one of the reasons why hearing loss is so much harder for us musicians to cope with. We used our ears almost everyday growing up (I'm not sure how long you played an instrument or listened to music for) to work with such a complex type of art that our brains are just so used to hearing these sound waves hit the hair cells in our ears. I mean i started listening to music at i'd say a pretty young age so my brain was developing with music in my life for close to a decade. It makes me so sad thinking how many nerve fibers or hair cells I've probably damaged all this time without noticing a difference in my hearing. It's almost supernatural how much different my hearing is right now compared to how it was last year and how I feel from it. It's insane. Not only is my hearing bad now but I can definitely tell my cognitive health has already declined from it.

 

@nick, I played music for about 25 years or so. Then I lost all hearing in my left ear one day and I started hearing noise in that ear instead. I hate that my left ear refuses to work for me but insists on working against me!
There are many possibilities for hearing loss and tinnitus treatment in the future. We have a balancing act.......We have to learn to live with our situations today while we hope for better things in the future. I would guess that many different types of illnesses put people in that predicament.

 

antibiotics are a major cause of hearing damage and there are many ototoxic drugs. I would definitely always carry a pair of high decibel earplugs and never use earbuds

 

@nick, amazing the similarities. I recognise so much of what you are going through.
Music and HIFI also was so important in my life.
To such an extend that I am seeing a therapist at the moment. At this point in time I am not able to cope with my tinnitus, hyperacusis and hearing loss. I too have been reading so many documents on the internet. It does surprise me how comprehensive your search on the internet seems to be.
Last week I was elated by the news that someone http://2030something.me/undergoing the trial from a gene therapy tells that he is hearing new frequencies! I know this is not scientific at the moment, but if this is reproduced on a audiogram it is spectacular news. News like that gets my hope up. Perhaps it is possible for medical science to have a cure in ten years time. It could be in my life time if all goes well, but surely in your lifetime.
I read al the documents you suggested in your introduction. At first I was disillusioned that more scientists are saying that "only" fixing damaged haircells in the cochlea is not all that needs doing after noise induced hearing loss. Also nerves can be damaged. But at the moment I just think about what Stanford and hearing health foundation state on there websites: "there could be a cure in ten years time".
My mood is going high and low all the time. I understand that this is indicative to depression.
This forum gives me support. There is a lot of empathy. Although I only just decided to join, I am beginning to see how much knowledge there is on this forum.
Let us concentrate and keep sharing the positive news out there.