Spontaneous Recovery Stats: Many Recover (3 Studies)

Check out:

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/27440/investig.pdf?sequence=1

In that dissertation, the author writes (on page 35 of 77):

"Of conscripts exposed to a single shot, tinnitus was initially present in 96% and hearing
loss in 52% (I). At discharge, 23% had tinnitus, 23% had hearing loss, and 39% had
either symptom still at discharge from the military service, indicating a long-lasting
effect after exposure to only a single shot. {Note: The figures above and the law for unions and intersections from probability theory imply that 7% had both tinnitus and hearing loss. This means that 70% out of 96%, or almost 73% had recovered from tinnitus.}

Although tinnitus was present in 97% of conscripts after AAT, the majority had resolved
by the end of the military service, at which time tinnitus was still present in 32%, and
68% had resolved. Hearing loss was present in 48% after AAT and 23% persisted at the
end of service. Thus, at the last visit before discharge, tinnitus, hearing loss or both were
present in 45%, and 55% were cured. Most of the conscripts received hyperbaric oxygen
treatment, so it is not known, what the spontaneous recovery rate of symptoms was, and
how many were cured due to treatment."

{"AAT [Acute acoustic trauma] causes including single gun shots, rapid firing by machine gun, cannon firing, explosions and fire crackers"}​

Page 15:

"In a study of a terrorist bomb explosion in a municipal bus, where 22 people lost their lives and 48 were wounded, 23 patients were hospitalized, and 17 of them were followed for six months in the otolaryngologic outpatient clinic (Cohen et al., 2002). All but one patient had a perforated TM. The most common auditory complaints of these 17 patients were aural fullness and pressure (88%), tinnitus (88%), otalgia (53%), dizziness (41%) and aural discharge (53%). After the six month follow-up period, 40% of the patients initially complaining of tinnitus still had tinnitus. Tinnitus had improved in 13%, and in 47% it had disappeared by the end of the six month follow-up period."​

and, on the same page:

"In that study, the patients underwent initial examination from the first day up to 10 months after the explosion, so the frequency of acute effects is not known. Pahor found the most frequent otologic symptoms in 111 hospitalized bombing victims to be deafness, high-pitched tinnitus, TM perforations, and earache. Otologic problems were found in less than one-third of the patients. Deafness was reported in 27 cases, and tinnitus in 26 cases. Twenty patients had perforated TMs. Hearing loss was mostly in the high-tones. In that study, all but one tinnitus case resolved spontaneously under follow-up (Pahor, 1981)."​

So it looks like noise/acoustic trauma tinnitus can resolve spontaneously, by itself. If there were people who got tinnitus after their eardrums were ruptured by an explosion, who got better, surely there is a chance that we can get better...

 

Some interesting take aways from the article. One stating that high-pitched sounds are probably more harmful to the ear than low-frequency sounds. The other being that the most frequent cause was an accidental shot, i.e. they were not expecting the sudden loud noise.

As far as spontaneous recovery from tinnitus is concerned, I believe it is much more likely following a single acoustic trauma setting off the tinnitus rather than continual exposure to loud noises over a long period of time (years).

 

According to American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery's website
http://www.entnet.org/content/tinnitus
"If you are in the ‘new onset’ period of tinnitus (less than 6 months), you can be reassured that, for many, the natural course of tinnitus is to improve over time and most people do not go on to have persistent, bothersome tinnitus."
===
Someone on this site had argued that it is mostly the young people who are able to recover from T. However, the study below seems to imply that even senior citizens can recover:
http://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/long-term-outcome-tinnitus-many-1154

"In one study Rubinstein et al. (3) found substantial longitudinal fluctuations in tinnitus and a high occurrence of spontaneous remission. The patients were studied at ages 70, 75 and 79 years. Results showed that tinnitus had increased in severity in 25 % of the women, and decreased in 58%, leaving 17% unchanged. For the men, tinnitus increased in 8% and decreased in 39%, with a larger proportion unchanged (53%). Of course, this study can be questioned as it relied on self-report and that other measures (such as maskability) could show a different result. However, the reliability of tinnitus matching is not impressive (4). It can be very hard for patients to remember how bad their tinnitus was a few years back and the anchor points may change over time so that a distress rating of 8 (on a 10-point scale) might mean a different thing five years later.

3. Rubinstein B, Österberg T, Rosenhall U. Longitudinal fluctuations in tinnitus as reported by an elderly population. J Audiol Med 1992;1:149-155."


There are studies out there that state that T is considered permanent after two years (implying that if your T onset is less than 2 years, you still have a hope that it will eventually go away).

 

Is this exclusively for people who know for a fact their tinnitus was noise induced?

 

It is likely that most senior citizens in the study on senior citizens did not get their T as a result of an acoustic trauma...

 

@Bill Bauer I was thinking more like head injury induced...

 

When I asked my ENT for a prognosis for my T (due to acoustic trauma), he said that the outcome of a concussion is impossible to forecast. He went on to explain that both conditions have to do with brain neurons, so recovery from T is also difficult to forecast. The reason I am bringing this up is that if it is impossible to forecast how well one recovers after a head injury, then it means that it is not the case that the forecast is grim - some people are able to completely recover... I sincerely hope that you are one of those lucky people.

 

@Bill Bauer
Thank you for the information, much appreciated!

 

Good stuff, Bill.. Thank you.

 

Interesting stats, will read the thread, if someone had told me my chances of recovery were that high I would have probably had a better time of it, who knows I might have even got better, maybe the negative thinking is to blame.
My audiologist at the hospital (specialised in tinnitus) was far less optimistic...wish I'd asked him if he had stats or anecdotes to back his claims.

 

These are interesting stats, thank you. My ENT was also pessimistic about my recovery from sleep medication induced tinnitus. Then he said his opinion was biased because his patents who did recover never spoke to him again. My primary care physician said it should go away on its own in a couple of months. So, I am also getting mixed messages. Three months in. I am trying to maintain some hope this situation isn't permanent, given I was only on those meds for a week and quit once the tinnitus appeared. What do they say about "hope springs eternal?"

 

Nice work @Bill Bauer . Hope is the first step. ...and that "step" can always benefit from some bolstering.

@Candy , I believe most practitioners are well-meaning. They understand that it is unethical and unkind to give someone hope when there is none. And, I believe most of practitioners sincerely believe there is no hope. So, they believe the best approach is to not waste your time and money on fruitless pursuits. We know differently. We have hope, based on facts and experience. So far, we are still unable to predict who exactly will improve or when, but I believe we are getting closer, as we identify subpopulations based on cause, triggers, sound characteristics, and lifefstyle/habits.

 

people who recover don't talk to the specialist. the only cases they see are long term cases. there are no legitimate studies to indicate long term prognosis - but seeming everyone I know that dealt with noise induced issues that actually calmed down and stopped wrecking their ears improved greatly.

a few cases:

- a friends father got it as a UK military chopper pilot - first year was horrid, slowly got better. still there, but totally habituated and its much much lower in volume
- friend of mine had it for ten years due to clubbing and metal shows. 4 years after he stopped going out its faded to where he can only hear it in a quiet room
- my physical therapist had it really bad for 8 months after a concert and its slowly improved since. 5 years later she gets it 1-2 days a month and its tolerable
- friend got it from shotgun with no earplugs. ears rang so bad he drank himself to sleep for 18 months. its been 4.5 years. he's mostly fine. gets a hiss 1-2 days a week that is "totally manageable". worked on garbage trucks the whole time with no earplugs.
- friend from an unrelated forum had H and T. H so bad he wore earplugs literally everywhere. 4 years later he runs a record label and just sold a song to SUBARU. He plays drums every day, his ringing comes only when he is very stressed out, tired, and alone.
- @I who love music post on MEGA T - while he didn't recover, he didn't stay in that severely worsened condition.

now a few famous people
- Neil Young couldn't be around electric guitars. released an acoustic album. Years later was on stage with pearl jam
- Jody Wisternoff still has from tinnitus but talks about the first months being so bad he could feel it vibrate his gums. This same symptoms comes and goes for me. In recent interviews he states "it's always there in quiet rooms". he plays at megaclubs and festivals
- Andy Timmons had horrible H. He now plays rock concerts

I think it's important to realize old injuries are never perfect - but in most cases there is an acute period that is much much worse, and most people here are in that phase. This isn't to diminish the long term sufferers. They do exist, and many are on this board. It's just important to keep perspective.

Protect your ears. stay healthy. passively hope for the best. it's all we can do.

 

You are less than a year in. There is still hope...

You would think that if doctors can't offer a cure, the least they can do is to provide one with statistics about what to expect.

The sources I glimpsed as I was searching for information about this condition, seemed to indicate that drug-induced tinnitus is the type of tinnitus with the best prognosis. I guess it depends on the drug...

 

Question to the people behind tinnitustalk.com: Would it be possible to e-mail all of the people who joined this forum, say, before 2016 and ask them to visit Tinnitus Talk to vote in a poll regarding their tinnitus status? This way we could get some data on the fraction of people who recovered, fraction who got better, how long it took them to get better, etc. There could be a separate poll for people with sudden onset tinnitus, people who got their tinnitus after a one-time acoustic trauma, etc. You are in a unique position of having e-mail addresses of all of those tinnitus sufferers. If a researcher were to try to do a study on tinnitus prognosis, the researcher would have trouble collecting data, as a result of privacy...

People might not want to come back to this site and start a new thread in the "success stories" section, but it seems to me that it is likely that many will be willing to participate in such a poll.

Hopefully the results of such a survey would provide some much needed hope to the visitors of your site.

I am just brainstorming here.

 

I love it.

 

I feel the same way. I was left with no info and feared the worst, spurred on by reading things on the internet of course...

It's certainly possible. I'm not sure how much response we would get from it but it's certainly something that sounds good to me. I'm in with any research that helps us understand ourselves better.

We could send a special newsletter out with a request to participate. I prefer a survey rather than a poll because we can target the questions better and it's an altogether cleaner presentation.

We have a current project where data mining techniques are being used (with University Magdeburg), looking at several things. One of these is the patient journey, I'm interested in how people begin, how their language changes over time and how they are when they stop posting.

Contrary to what you may think (and certainly what TT has been accused of in some quarters), the early results show that we have overwhelmingly more positive postings than negative. We're hoping to learn a lot from this project to help us improve the site and improve the journey for people that find us in a fragile state.

 

Thank you so much for this post. Totally agree - perspective is important.

 

I read somewhere that the worst thing tinnitus sufferer can do, is to google "tinnitus". I guess this is because in addition to no cure, there is almost no information about what one is to expect.

Besides the cause of tinnitus, the survey may also ask for their age (as some people argue that younger people are more likely to recover).

When one finds out that T has no cure, the next thing one is interested in is the probability of spontaneous recovery. It appears that (every day?) people visit this site looking for information about the odds of eventually being free of tinnitus...

Thank you for considering creating that survey! I am looking forward to see how this turns out.

 

Have you seen the results from our previous survey? See here: https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-hub-talk-survey-results.14295/

We can open with some of the usual questions so we can get data that compares to other sources. I'll also ask a few people for opinion on what questions they would like to see. One contact in particular springs to mind, who I've mailed this morning, as we may be able to tie it into some other work and potentially publish the results.

I'll update when I hear back but in the mean time we should think about the important questions to ask.

I think the same is true for almost any health condition. Doctor Google nearly always gives a terminal diagnosis

 

You may want to ask about the timing of recovery milestones (e.g., when did tinnitus get noticeably quieter or less piercing, etc.)

 

Yes, so we can ask:

1. When did your tinnitus start?
2. When did you seek help (online / through a doctor)?
3. Has your tinnitus changed?
4. Rate the annoyance / loudness from start to now
5. Maybe ask from a selection of things what has improved, like sleep, fatigue, anxiety etc...?
6. Was there a treatment that made a difference or did it just happen?

 

I realize that this question implicitly includes the question "did you completely recover from tinnitus?" But I am worried that a respondent who doesn't currently suffer from tinnitus, will think that the survey is directed towards people still suffering from tinnitus (and so will decide not to answer).

It might be a good idea to be direct and to ask - "Do you currently suffer from tinnitus?"

Or make your question 3 a multiple choice question, and make one of the answers "I had recovered from tinnitus"?

This is a tough one.

 

Maybe "what caused your tinnitus?"

 

Gives hope, even though I'm doing much better than I was when I first got it. U can imagine Depression and anxiety at its finest.. but I was able to overcome that through talks with my love ones. Now I guess just hope it will just be a story if the past. Only on my 5th week so hope is high for recovery . I'm only 27

 

Unfortunately, the title of the thread and the subsequent discussion is misleading. As it indicates in one of the quoted passages, HBOT was administered to the individuals in study I, so they do not claim to know the spontaneous recovery rate:

"Although tinnitus was present in 97% of conscripts after AAT, the majority had resolved
by the end of the military service, at which time tinnitus was still present in 32%, and
68% had resolved. Hearing loss was present in 48% after AAT and 23% persisted at the
end of service. Thus, at the last visit before discharge, tinnitus, hearing loss or both were
present in 45%, and 55% were cured. Most of the conscripts received hyperbaric oxygen
treatment, so it is not known, what the spontaneous recovery rate of symptoms was, and
how many were cured due to treatment."

 

I see that you are right. My T must have caused me to lose focus just when I was coming up with the title for the thread. Too bad I can't edit the thread in order to change the title.

Having said that, the two studies of survivors of terrorist bombs seem to indicate impressive spontaneous recovery rates (47% recovery after 6 months/13% improvement & 26/27 = 96% recovery). The third study was that of seniors, where recovery rates were also not insignificant.

 

you can definitely heal from tinnitus, or at least have a 95% recovery.

don't listen to the ENT quacks. it is not in their interest for you to get better. they want to sell you hearing aids

 

My ENT didn't even try to sell anything to me. He just wanted me out of his office so that he could see his other patients.

 

Pretty much the feeling I got from mine