Poll: Hyperacusis Has a Number of Subcategories — How Do You Perceive Yours?

Hyperacusis is a very wide term and has got a lot of subcategories.

I would call my tinnitus reactive tinnitus but I understand there is no such term. Is reactive hyperacusis a better term?

How do you perceive your hyperacusis?

 

Interestingly, even before my acoustic injury I would hear cars passing by our house on a wet street and if the windows were closed, I would hear a specific crackle when they passed us. The sound was just a little bit different. This is how I could tell it was wet outside, hah. Now I hear the same thing when cars pass us on dry surface. So I think I had minor damage prior to my trauma.

Interestingly, I had zero other symptoms apart from mild tinnitus that started in 2019 and went away by 2021.

Now my hyperacusis is very weird. I have beeps and hums over broad spectrum sounds like a tap, a fan, road noise in our otherwise very quiet EV. I also am more sensitive to high frequency sounds like car brakes. Before my injury, I would hear them but go 'meh'. My wife, however, would always wince/cringe at them. Now I understand her.

Thankfully, I have no pain hyperacusis.

 

I have really bad loudness hyperacusis, i.e. everything sounds much louder than it should, therefore something doesn't have to be so loud to be perceived as "loud".

As my hyperacusis worsened, firstly through sound deprivation, secondly through a noise exposure, my threshold for spiking increased so now I spike to most sounds, this is what I call reactive tinnitus. To me, there's no doubt that spiking correlate to the severity of the hyperacusis, and if latter can be improved, the former may follow.

This is just my speculation, but I don't believe hyperacusis is the culprit behind sound distortions, i.e. "spikes" which recede immediately after the noise exposure. I believe it may be more related to nerve damage, but I certainly don't know for sure.

Stacken

 

So do you not have tinnitus now?

I have had a similar experience as you before my ear problems.

For many years if I shook my head quick back and forth like a wet dog, I would hear a slight sharp shaking noise in my head/ ear.

It might have started when I was blasted many years ago in a HiFi shop. I don’t know and never had an issue with it. It wasn’t many times I shook my had that vigorously in 10 years time

I do feel a correlation with my highly reactive tinnitus today though.

 

I do have confirmed nerve damage. In fact, my whole thing started by my noticing the tap is beeping. I don't know whether to call this reactive tinnitus or hyperacusis.

 

You should add fullness in the ears to this list.

 

Isn't that "discomfort"? For me it is.

 

Oh, I do have the good old regular tinnitus. More than 10 noises, in fact.

 

If hyperacusis is damage to the auditory nerve, can someone tell me what cure can save us from this? I don't think it's possible to cure...

 

Hyperacusis is painful, although ENTs keep saying that hearing is not connected to pain receptors so it should not be painful.

I wonder why there are references to the "threshold of pain" in a decibel scale.

 

Certain sounds make it feel like my ear is being cut on the inside. The higher and louder the sound, the worse it is. In general, things sound more sharp. Pain stays for a bit after like a sun burn. Slight tingling/tightness near my jawline (this is the least distressing symptom).

My tinnitus is reactive.

I do have what I think is a unique anecdote. I had hyperacusis in my right ear since a couple days after my acoustic trauma but my left ear was normal for almost a month thereafter. No pain at all to anything. The day before my left ear started to hurt my left ear tinnitus became very reactive and it was the only time my ear and face ever felt hot. The day after a remote dropped on a wooden floor and it was the first instance of pain and is now sensitive ever since.

 

From what I understand, some people think it’s from the type 2 nerve fibers that after noise exposure turn into pain receptors. If you identify and mark which ones are over reactive and silence them via mRNA, you may get relief.

 

Well, pain is discomfort too.

 

OTO-413 or a bullet...?

 

I strongly agree with this. It could be partly broken hair cells or broken tiny nerves connected to them. I also suspect malfunction of the spontaneous nerve activity. They are firing out of the blue...

However, I think electric stimulation via the ear canal or the oval window is a good approach to calm this down.

ResearchGate: Electrical Stimulation of the Cochlea to Reduce Tinnitus

It is quite a lot of things to play around with here.

Current: mA
Waveforms: square, sine, and triangular
Frequency: Hz
Time intervals
Positioning of the electrodes

 

I don't even know if I have hyperacusis.

The loud sounds don't cause me pain, but if a car passes by honking or if I'm exposed to a lot of wind, I gain new tones of tinnitus.

I feel discomfort from the loud sounds because I'm afraid of making my tinnitus worse. If I didn't have tinnitus, the loud sounds wouldn't be uncomfortable for me.

 

There doesn't necessarily have to be pain involved. Do sounds "sound" louder than they did before?

I also believe hyperacusis can manifest in may forms and severities. There could be some kind of over-sensitivity involved which treats loud sounds(but not very loud) as "shocks" which in turn generates more tones. I believe I went through a period like that where a lot of trivial sound would just cause new tones constantly; I had gained like 7 new tones, but this did die down and a lot of tones subsided. Nowadays I usually don't get new tones, but instead increased volume, something which I find a lot more distressing than changing tones and frequencies.

 

I have increased vestibular issues when my hyperacusis is irritated. Like my ears could be in a good place for the day, then something agitates them and they stay sensitive the rest of the day and, as other things compound the irritation and I get pain, pressure and numbness in my face, I’ll start to feel more off balance.

Does anyone else have this type of reaction to noise exposures?

 

I am a musician who has developed severe tinnitus accompanied by hyperacusis. I didn't even know the word until the folks at UCI ENT diagnosed me this way. I've been on something of an incredible journey so far, which I recently wrote about here: https://www.sounding.com/2021/09/04/topamaximumsound/

I have never experienced this phenomenon before the past year and a half, although I often sensed tinnitus due to my experiences as a performing musician (my day job is internet infra). But suddenly in early 2020 I got sick with some kind of virus (really don't know if it was COVID-19, but some symptoms matched) that destroyed my inner ear. I was treated for the inflammation but the ringing white noise kept getting worse, always triggered by droning resonant sounds like AC and fans or the car running or the sink. Crinkling foil or plastic bags are unbearably loud and distorted like this, and when it's really bad the rustling of my clothing or brushing my head will be magnified 1000x.

Hyperacusis seems to manifest as if the tinnitus is overdriven, like if you were to play my tinnitus through a tiny speaker and turned the volume way up so it was distorted. And when it's engaged, it's reactive I suppose... but not quite reactive like the AC will make my tinnitus get louder, but as if the impulse amplitude of the sounds around me within the range of my tinnitus are being mirror imaged in my hearing, but as high pitched distorted tinnitus.

And the highly activated noise sound cluster will "stick" long after the sound that produced it has stopped. In my blog post I liken it to holding down the damper pedal on a piano while playing.

I very rarely feel pain unless very low frequency sounds are very loud. But the distortion from the hyperacusis episodes is unbearable. But they are "episodes"... only they tend to last for weeks on end. The staff at UCI call this atypical migraine, and the other thing my blog talks about is my failed treatment with migraine medication, which is an entirely other story that has been a living nightmare. Read the blog for more if you are curious.

I haven't been able to do sonic meditation or make very much sound art for nearly a year because of this and I am frightened to the bone about it ruining the biggest love of my life, music.

 

I used to have tinnitus in one ear in my right ear but I developed tinnitus in my left ear last month due to no reason, maybe from my head cold that lasted for 2 days.

But the left ear is more reactive. Whenever I hear sounds above a normal threshold, it spikes for a couple of seconds, sometimes a minute, with a slight discomfort and then it settles down to its baseline ringing.

I'm just wondering if this could lead to hyperacusis if I expose myself to loud noise?