New University of Michigan Tinnitus Discovery — Signal Timing

Because my hearing loss is severe and I would not hear at the tinnitus frequency.

Look, there are lots of unknowns, just personally not getting my hopes up.

 

Do you think that Dr. Shore's device could possibly help the people who developed tinnitus from ototoxicity?

Why do you not think that it would help someone with unilateral tinnitus?

 

@SarahMLFlemmer, it's all guesswork, none of us know.

 

Drinks on me buddy!

 

I think it will. Dr. Shore's device aims at targeting the overexcited, out of sync cells that end up ‘producing’ tinnitus in the brain. The cause down the chain as to why they’re in this excited state probably won’t matter all that much.

 

What I don’t understand from Dr. Shore’s work is this (I know we are still waiting for the results from the Phase 2):

Lenire showed similar results but it did not translate to the real world going by Tinnitus Talk user experiences.

I know Dr. Shore is using a control group unlike Lenire...

How will hers be so special? I know she appears to be a lot more invested in tinnitus research and very intelligent, but after following tinnitus research myself for years, I can’t help but feel somewhat skeptical, yet have some small amount of hope.

It all appears great in theory, I read every single thing about Lenire’s TENT-A1 and TENT-A2 trials and it was so convincing, only to read failure after failure from ‘real life patients’...

 

I totally agree. It does not matter if you lost some hearing because of a metal concert, ototoxic drug, or maybe alien fu...ed you in your ear while you were sleeping. At the end, there is hyperexcitation in DCN as Dr. Shore has said. So everyone, be optimistic. Please be!

 

Just wait till the results are out. Just being pessimistic for the sake of it is pointless.

 

There’s a difference between being pessimistic and showing a healthy amount of skepticism. Dr. Shore admitted herself in one of her videos that there is a strong placebo effect in tinnitus trials, along with tinnitus being subjective and having no objective measure of it.

I will also add, even if the results are conclusive that it ‘works’, I will still be waiting for the experiences and feedback of long-term Tinnitus Talk members.

You can always tell ‘veteran’ sufferers from newbies. There is a reason veterans question almost everything with any new treatment.

 

1. Neuromod did not develop a proper model of tinnitus. 2. Neuromod did not spend 15 years on basic science. 3. Neuromod did not perform a double-blinded crossover study. 4. Neuromod do not have magical jacket Dr. Shore has on every interview.

You can be skeptical as long as you want. In a meantime, together with my fella @Mentos, we will be snoring coke from the vacuum cleaner tube, on a tinnitus-free party.

 

I think the main differences are:

1) Timing. Timing is the most important in bimodal stimulation. Lenire might just have bad timings or a delay due to Bluetooth.

2) Sounds. Lenire plays keyboard-like sounds with rain-like white noise in the background. What's the point of having any timings with constant white noise in the background?!

3) Location of stimulation.

The fact that Lenire has SOME effect on me, that's just not permanent and too weak, makes me hope for the Michigan device even more. I've tasted some of the potential effect. Bimodal stimulation it our best bet out of this hell in the 2020s!

 

This is why Dr. Shore did a crossover trial to compare the same subjects who had both the treatment and the sham.

It won't work for everyone and it's crazy to think it will.

Also, unlike Lenire, Dr. Shore's treatment was designed based on scientific findings. Ask Neuromod to publish their research on scientific findings and how it led to a treatment. They won't need long to discuss it.

 

You don't know me. I've had tinnitus for 6 years.

 

Placebo effect is also some effect.

 

This has probably been brought up somewhere in this thread, but from my understanding, the device’s auditory stimuli will be a tone that matches the person’s tinnitus frequency, correct?

I know I am not the only one here with not only more than one sound, but sounds/tones that can change some in quality, like frequency, due to reactivity or just because it wants to!

I would love to hope, as long as the auditory stimuli being presented is “close enough” to let’s say your most distressing tone/sound, it could still have some positive effect on that tone?

I know no one can answer that, but it’s just the hard reality myself and others live in. What we would do to have a single, constant tone and not make things confusing!

 

I would assume, in part, that’s down to the patient?

I almost feel like this is the next step of residual inhibition. The electrical stimuli just helps make it permanent in some way. I have tones between 9,000 Hz - 13,000 Hz that go away if I play a tone through speakers that’s anywhere near them (like 8,000 Hz - 15,000 Hz). The further away from my actual tinnitus tone I get, it just means I need to play the tone louder on my speakers for it to have an effect.

I think if you react to a tone with residual inhibition, it’ll work for this device. I also have tones at 4,000 Hz that’s the same for tones I play between 3,000 Hz - 6000 Hz.

What I do hope is that the frequency played by the device is user changeable. Once you’ve completed your treatment time at X frequency, you can just alter a setting and start treating your next tone at Y frequency. So if you have many tones, it’s just a case of spending another 30 minutes or so treating those per day.

And who knows, maybe the tone isn’t majorly important? Maybe it’s the combination of real sound stimuli paired with electrical stimuli and when the fusiform cells within the DCN calm down, they ALL calm down.

If you can experience residual inhibition, I’d say (in my very uninformed opinion) you have a good chance of this working well.

 

Someone from here already asked Dr. Shore about multi-tonal tinnitus. The answer was that the majority of tinnitus sufferers have more than one sound. So basically Dr. Shore does not consider multi-tonal tinnitus as something that would stop the treatment from being effective. As a multi-tonal sufferer, I find this situation to be very positive. I'm planning one drug/alcohol party for every tone that will be cured by Dr. Shore's device. I'm just scared for one fella here who has around 15 tones... Maybe he will need do replace this forum with the liver-transplantation forum.

 

During the Palm Springs Hearing Seminar I asked Dr. Shore about having multiple tones and if her device would work for someone like that. She just said that "everyone has multiple tones". I know her device is supposed to target specific sounds that we hear, but obviously it works for people with multiple tones if she's said that.

They have an app they've developed called "TinnTester" that's supposed to help you identify sounds for the device to target so they can affect the part of the brain that the sound is coming from. Maybe you target particular sounds or sounds and keep doing it to reduce different ones? It's hard to know how it'll work until we start using it. But that's how it's supposed to work I believe.

 

If this device were to target the additional devilish high-pitched tone in my left ear that I developed around 2017/18, I would consider that a cure. More than happy to leave all the other tones alone to do their thing.

I think this concept is very difficult for those new to tinnitus to even grasp, let alone understand. But old-timers like you and me who've been round the block a few times with this have a differing and more realistic view, I reckon.

 

I feel the exact same way with my awful 12 kHz+ crap. If that alone diminished or went away along with its reactivity, I could handle my 3 other tones and move on with life feeling 70% cured.

 

Yeah, the longer you live with tinnitus and experience the worst it has to offer, a positive change, even if it’s small, can make all the difference in the world, whether it’s a volume reduction, a tone or two being eliminated, or reactivity easing up.

 

It will be a BIG change. 75% tinnitus volume reduction will be as good as a cure. Who knows, maybe after extended use of the device the reduction will be even greater. I also think, those, who are well habituated, will have the best results. This is only my assumption though.

I agree. When my tinnitus started, I wanted regain total silence. Now 75% tinnitus volume reduction would be totally acceptable. I hate Jastreboff's agenda, which says the loudness of tinnitus does not have any impact on tinnitus distress. I would be totally fine with 25% of current loudness. Has anybody here had contact with him about such a matter? I might soon contact him (I want to also state that when he says "tinnitus volume reduction will never be achieved," he scares us a great deal and works against our habituation). If someone has asked him to explain the lack of correlation between tinnitus loudness and distress that he claims, then I will skip that part. Anyway - I will need to sober up first, I'm drinking a lot of alcohol for tinnitus research recently. Of course everything is done in the name of science!.

 

I've lived with tinnitus for around 10 years in total. The last 6 months have been really quite bad. I can't equate my length of time with tinnitus with a quantified amount of suffering. Somebody who's had it for maybe a year may have it worse than I've had it for 10 years. On the other hand, some people are able to just say "yeah, I hear a ringing 24/7, I just ignore it" - unfortunately, I'm not one of those people.

Regardless of how long you've had tinnitus, how you got it, how loud it is, how many tones you have or how reactive it is, I hope this device brings us all relief from this insidious monstrous condition and we can all celebrate in @awake 44 style.

 

That’s me (unless someone else also has this many tones). I sometimes wonder if having so many tones actually makes it easier to tune out, like a swarm of insects rather than one annoying insect.

Fortunately I can inhibit every single one of them. A couple times a day I’ll get a tinnitus masking app and slowly slide it up from 2 kHz to 11 kHz which momentarily knocks out all of my tones. The ten seconds of silence is probably one of the most satisfying things a human can experience lol.

I will say that my vaccine-induced tinnitus is a good bit lower than it was in 2021 when I first got so many tones. They’re all still there but just lower in volume. My hyperacusis is also improving. So hopefully I can at least maintain things until this device comes out.

It does make sense that Dr. Shore's device could be the next step in residual inhibition, really hoping that’s the case. Many of us can objectively silence our tinnitus for a moment by playing a matching tone. Literal silence where you don’t hear it at all. We just need to figure out how to extend that silence by identifying whatever “satisfies” the tinnitus generating aspect of our brains when we play these matching tones. And that seems to be at least partially what Dr. Shore's device is doing if we are to believe the results. I’m cautiously optimistic but I’m not going to celebrate until it’s working on my tinnitus.

 

When Jastreboff discusses tinnitus loudness, he talks in absolutes about something he can't clinically define. We'll be able to put all that nonsense to bed the day we have an objective way of measuring tinnitus.

I shall use that excuse the next time Mrs. UKB admonishes me about my red wine habit lol

 

I've come to believe it is the tone, shape, and the shifting of the sounds that contributes much more to my distress than the volume. If the sound itself wasn't painful in addition to being loud, it would be unfortunate, but ultimately something I could probably accept and move on with.

The converse of this and something that might explain the relatively limited change in TFI in relation to a 75% reduction in volume, is that if the sound is painful, it is still painful at a lower volume.

 

I thought the TFI reduction was low because it was 30-50 in the first place. So it didn't have to be a large reduction for it to be in a not bothersome category.

 

Much love and best wishes to all of you. I'm so grateful to have all of your conversations to read when the spikes invade!

 

I assume it would keep going down with continued use of the device? The study period was 12 weeks or so, wasn’t it? I wonder if the reduction would keep going after a year of use.

 

All I know is I cannot wait to try the device. A modest reduction would make a big difference for me. Here's to hoping this makes it to market sooner rather than later.