Poll: Better and Worse Tinnitus Days, Do You Know the Phenomenon?

There is some pretty good correlation with when I have had acupuncture. I will at times have one or two good days after acupuncture. This is not a given, but some months it’s almost always true and other months the acupuncture is not as effective.

 

As a neuroscientist who studies the limbic system, I think I'll quash that idea right out of the gate.

 

What do you think of this paper?

https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(10)00325-9.pdf

 

@Agrajag364

First and foremost: while I am a neuroscientist, and I do study the limbic system, I (currently) know about as much about tinnitus as you do (or maybe less, because I've only had it for 2 months). So in that regard, it's hard for me to critique this paper with complete conviction. But I'll give you my thoughts, such as they are:

First, Neuron is a top journal - better than any journal I've yet published in - and so on that basis alone I'd say the article has considerable respectability. At the very least, one can expect that it was an influential paper when it came out.

That said, the paper is still from 2010, and in neuroscience timeframes, that's practically eons ago. First: the quality/sophistication of neuroimaging studies has increased exponentially since then. But also, theories/ideas of the brain's communication networks continue to evolve. And so, even though the paper was likely influential back then, I'd probably not rely on it too heavily unless subsequent work has backed up it's hypotheses. I haven't looked to see how well cited this paper was, or what work it's since spawned... but those would be important factors to consider.

Re the hypothesis itself: I'm personally pretty skeptical. While it's not impossible to conceive of limbic structures as gating out unwanted sound, the dominant theories of limbic system function continue to proscribe it a primary role in identifying, highlighting and activating brain/body responses to important environmental stimuli. And so I'd still lean towards theories that hypothesize the limbic system as incorrectly interpreting the sounds as important, rather than as inadvertently letting them through. But as I said, I don't really have a strong knowledge of limbic/auditory cortex interactions, so perhaps I'm wrong.

Even if I'm wrong, and limbic regions do gate these unwanted sounds: I can't help but think that this theory is somewhat akin to saying that it was the princess's fault that she got kidnapped, because after the city walls were destroyed by the incoming troops, she was outnumbered and overpowered. To argue that killing hair cells led to a compensatory sound that then overpowered the gates...and so the gate must have be broken, doesn't fully jive for me.

But with all that said, one really important point: the cause and the solution for tinnitus may not be the same. So, for instance, while I'm skeptical that poor limbic gating is the *cause* of the tinnitus symptoms, I think it's more plausible that neural systems could be altered so that the limbic system (or some other region) were strengthened to counteract, and thus gate, the tinnitus sounds. Does that make sense? It may not be that we have a broken limbic system, but it could be that super strengthening it could help.

Not sure if that was more info than you were looking for. Sometimes I get carried away.

 

Not so with me. I mean, no doubt my conscious perception changes all the time. Sometimes I'm distracted and sometimes I'm tired and sometimes I'm wired and whatever else. But there's also no doubt that my actual volume levels change - and this happens both "in the real world" and when I plug up my ears. On really good days I can hardly hear it *with* my ears plugged. On really bad days, it rises above just about all other environmental noise.

Why does this happen? Sadly, so far I'm at the same loss as everyone else. Sleep doesn't seem to play much of a role for me (I've always been very tolerant of changes in sleep patterns), stress doesn't seem to play too much of a role for me (I've always been very low stress). The only two things that reliably change my volume is noise exposure (duh), and exercise: vigorous exercise always increases my volume. My guess is that this is a vascular effect, with more blood flow to the extremities leading to a greater tinnitus effect. But who knows really.

Anyway, long story short: I'm actively searching for relationships, but haven't yet landed on anything sufficiently solid.

 

I have the same basic pattern and question but the thing that helped the most was learning to just "let it be", accept that the sound is doing whatever it's doing, and stop spending so much time consciously tracking it and wondering. It's just a "harmless" (if extremely distressing) artifact of neurological activity; it has no special significance beyond that.

Good luck! Love rules. Sex is a nice bonus.

 

I have the certain impression that the daily tinnitus intensity fluctuations (at least with me) have a somatic origin.

 

This survey showed that the vast majority of tinnitus sufferers with daily intensity fluctuations found no cause or correlation for the changing intensity.
Perhaps someone here would like to discuss the causes of spikes further...

 

Best advice I ever got was to stay off this and all internet tinnitus sites. The more I focus on it, the worse it is. The more I focus on things that interest and keep me happy, the less I perceive it and/or care about it.

Still, I like to check in here periodically when I want to indulge in self-pity and feel sorry for myself.

 

Mine spikes when my ET is blocked! Wether this is caused by my diseased sinuses/huge adenoids or both will be found out this year with corrective surgery! Every few weeks I get a sinus infection followed by a period of diminished hearing/loud tinnitus/sometimes distortion of pitches. Then the hearing comes back and the tinnitus trails off after a couple of weeks to a hiss/mostly nothing noticeable only to return again within a week or so. Been in this cycle since Jan 19’ !