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Theory of Everything... for Tinnitus: Thalamocortical Dysrhythmia

Samir

Manager
Author
Staff
Benefactor
Jan 3, 2017
1,138
Sweden
Tinnitus Since
12/2016
Cause of Tinnitus
Accoustic trauma
A recent study gives validity to a decades old theory called Thalamocortical Dysrhythmia (TCD), which may help explain the underlying mechanism of a number of neurological disorders, including tinnitus. According to one of the authors of the research paper, which has been published in Nature Communications, this is the largest experimental evaluation of TCD since it was proposed in 1996.

A brainwave abnormality could be a common link between Parkinson's disease, neuropathic pain, tinnitus and depression — a link that authors of a new study suggest could lead to treatment for all four conditions.

I hope that other research groups will be able to replicate these results.

News piece: https://www.utdallas.edu/news/2018/...rate-Di_story-wide.html?WT.mc_id=NewsHomePage

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02820-0
 
Nice addition of more research in support of brain functions. I stopped posting about this, but my tiny abnormal brain agrees.(y)
 
I also believe that the underlying cause of tinnitus is an abnormality occured in the brainwaves.
As for treatments, in this case...
How can this abnormality be treated?
There is a long thread about this TCD an operation (HIFU) that a doctor thought about hoping that it could fix the TCD, and a very sad case (viking) who went through a very costly and painful operation in Switzwerland, and he put up with the long waiting, the transportation, the high price and all the pain, only to end up in great dismal after obtaining NO results in the reduction of tinnitus. He got disappointed and upset that he left the forum.
 
The article indeed is a great find. What i noticed first was the picture, where problems in two areas, one coloured in pink, in the temporal lobe, and the other one in green, also on the larger area of the temporal lobe, can lead to tinnitus. Problems in the green area can lead to tinnitus, but I do not think that acoustic traumas can cause problems in the green areas, and that may be the cause why so many people did not have any noise exposure or acoustic traumas, but remained with tinnitus after a difficult time (stress, anxiety, bereavement, etc) in their lives (many members report "stress" as the cause of their tinnitus, and that green area corroborates with what they are saying
 
I also believe that the underlying cause of tinnitus is an abnormality occured in the brainwaves.
Initially, I thought of tinnitus purely as a problem of the ear. It later dawned on me that it has more to do with the brain than the ear.

As for treatments, in this case...
How can this abnormality be treated?
That I do not know, but Dr. Vanneste sounded confident:
"From here, we hope to stimulate specific brain areas involved in these diseases at alpha frequencies to normalize the brainwaves again. We have a rationale that we believe will make this type of therapy work."

There is a long thread about this TCD an operation (HIFU) that a doctor thought about hoping that it could fix the TCD, and a very sad case (viking) who went through a very costly and painful operation in Switzwerland, and he put up with the long waiting, the transportation, the high price and all the pain, only to end up in great dismal after obtaining NO results in the reduction of tinnitus. He got disappointed and upset that he left the forum.
That's one single case. Of which I know nothing about. Nor do I know anything about that doctor you mention, or the operation in question. Many crooks that call themselves doctors are out there, trying to make a fortune out of hopeless people, people in despair. That's a known, established fact. We have to be careful with who we trust and who we give our money to.

Who was the doctor he saw? Doctor who? :oldman: Where did he have this treatment? What exactly was this treatment?

TCD may not be the answer to tinnitus. In fact, tinnitus is a complex problem, and unless we start breaking it down into smaller pieces that we can work on, then we may never understand it or find a solution to it. But it seems to me like these researchers have discovered something important. It cannot be swept away as nothing just because some guy on a forum reported bad results from some TCD treatment he payed some doctor to perform on him.

Problems in the green area can lead to tinnitus, but I do not think that acoustic traumas can cause problems in the green areas, and that may be the cause why so many people did not have any noise exposure or acoustic traumas, but remained with tinnitus after a difficult time (stress, anxiety, bereavement, etc) in their lives (many members report "stress" as the cause of their tinnitus, and that green area corroborates with what they are saying

vanneste-figure-924-2018-05.jpg


Mind me if I'm wrong, I am no neuroscientist. But as I recall, that green area is the auditory cortex, is it not?

So... acoustic trauma kills off your hair cells... and what do you think it does to your nervous system? Or better yet, what do you think fear does to your nervous system? The very definition of fear is feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence of imminent danger. That's what an acoustic trauma does, it kills your ears, puts extreme stress on your auditory system and the entire nervous system, including the areas that process emotions.

Any kind of traumatic event will send your stress levels through the roof. The damage is not only physical (the visible) but also psychological/neurological (the invisible). It doesn't have to be acoustic trauma. You could go through a divorce, lose a loved one or lose a job. Of course, you can experience stress for any number of reasons. It's not possible to exist in a modern/westernized world without feeling the effects of stress. Even getting a bad grade on an exam can cause you to stress out of fear of not getting into collage.

To some degree, stress can also be a source of good, it can help us survive. That's why we have it, it's part of the body's defense mechanism. It can help us push through difficulties. But it can either make us or break us. Balance is the key here. But it's not difficult to throw us off balance, because we live in a time where the society puts unreasonable pressure and unreasonable expectations on us from the day we are born.
 
It's definitely a brain issue. I have tinnitus, visual snow and BFS (benign fasciculation syndrome) all three are made worse from anxiety and stress. All three are guessed to be neurological in nature for a lot of cases. As soon as we can pin point the reason why and where our nerves are misfiring. We'll be much closer to a cure.
 
What really speaks to me with this study is their generalist approach, where they try to tie all these different disorders together and look for clues that are common to all of them. It's something that may bring some new light to some of the questions.

The authors of this paper are Dirk De Ridder of University of Otago, Sven Vanneste of University of Texas at Dallas and Jae-Jin Song of Seoul National University. I don't recognize the other two guys, but De Ridder is a well known name in the tinnitus researcher community. This is how he describes his research.

My research is centered on a Darwinian predictive brain model with Bayesian updating to adapt to an ever changing environment. This model is the basis to understand common pathophysiological mechanisms clustering groups of pathologies, such as thalamocortical dysrhythmias (pain, tinnitus, epilepsy, depression, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia) or obsessive compulsive spectrum disorder (addiction, OCD, eating disorders,...).

https://www.otago.ac.nz/dsm/people/expertise/profile/?id=1297

The second thing that I find very interesting is their use of artificial intelligence.

From the research paper:

However, the validity of TCD is a matter of ongoing controversy. Recent interest in cross-frequency coupling in physiological states might lead to a wider acceptance of TCD as a pathological state. It is, therefore, of interest to verify whether a purely data-driven approach by means of a support vector machine (SVM) can reliably detect TCD.

And here is an excerpt from a Korean biomedical news outlet:

... researchers confirmed for the first time that by analyzing a person's brain wave with a machine learning AI system they could differentiate healthy people from sick ones.

As a result, the AI system recorded a diagnose accuracy of 88 percent for tinnitus, 92 percent for chronic pain, 94 percent for Parkinson's disease and 75 percent for depression. The results of the study showed that AI system, based on EEG, is an objective diagnostic method for diseases.

http://www.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=3103

Hopefully, in a not too distant future, I envision being able to pop into one of these à-la-Matrix kind of machines and have your tinnitus objectively diagnosed. :blackalien: Then pop into another machine to have it sucked out of existence, just as easy as pulling out a bad tooth. :cool:
 
I'm not really convinced about any of this. We KNOW there are physical causes for some tinnitus, such as sound injury, malfunctioning eustachian tubes, allergies, or even tumor growth. How can something with a known physical cause be the result of a brainwave? TCD seems like a symptom, not an underlying cause.
 
Interesting post. I know for sure there are several physical issues that can cause Tinnitus (loud noise, ear infections, sleep apnea ...) but I must agree that there is also some kind of psychological reason for T, at least for myself, I have experienced much lower T when I felt good, low stress and anxiety, so I'm pretty sure that I could do much better if I could lower the stress levels at home here. Financial and emotional stress are the worst for T from my experience.
 
That's one single case. Of which I know nothing about. Nor do I know anything about that doctor you mention, or the operation in question. Many crooks that call themselves doctors are out there, trying to make a fortune out of hopeless people, people in despair. That's a known, established fact. We have to be careful with who we trust and who we give our money to.

Who was the doctor he saw? Doctor who? :oldman: Where did he have this treatment? What exactly was this treatment?

He's talking about the HIFU surgery by Professor Jeanmonod in Switzerland. This was probably before your time on this forum but the thread was one of the most viewed when it was relevant. ATEOS also went there but wasn't eligible for surgery if I remember correctly. Here's the thread:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/hifu-high-intensity-focused-ultrasound-surgery.276/
 
He's talking about the HIFU surgery by Professor Jeanmonod in Switzerland. This was probably before your time on this forum but the thread was one of the most viewed when it was relevant. ATEOS also went there but wasn't eligible for surgery if I remember correctly. Here's the thread:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/hifu-high-intensity-focused-ultrasound-surgery.276/
I just skimmed through that thread. But it all seems fishy to me. Maybe they were ahead of their time and they were onto something. Maybe they just didn't get the treatment protocol right, or the whole approach was wrong. Or they simply wanted to make some money, using the latest research findings at the time to validate their treatment. They don't even list tinnitus on their website as a condition that they treat. But they do list tremor, Parkinson's and pain.
 
I've read in an article that the sound of tinnitus itself is not the problem, but electrochemical reactions in different parts of the brain which increase the attention level to said reaction. A sound who might be going unnoticed in the brain will be experienced as strong due to the triggering of these reactions. This might explain why people experience different tones and pitches of tinnitus, why it occurs during acoustric trauma, allergies, life stress, head tumors etc. Even though all these causes originally differ, they trigger various electrochemical reactions whether that be a physical head injury or emotional grief. Since the electrochemical reaction is a new and abnormal one, the brain calls your attention to it. It's this link between the chemical changes, the brain's interpretation, and finally your awareness, that causes alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness -> continuation of increased attention level -> alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness -> increased attention level -> alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness ... etc.
 
I've read in an article that the sound of tinnitus itself is not the problem, but electrochemical reactions in different parts of the brain which increase the attention level to said reaction. A sound who might be going unnoticed in the brain will be experienced as strong due to the triggering of these reactions. This might explain why people experience different tones and pitches of tinnitus, why it occurs during acoustric trauma, allergies, life stress, head tumors etc. Even though all these causes originally differ, they trigger various electrochemical reactions whether that be a physical head injury or emotional grief. Since the electrochemical reaction is a new and abnormal one, the brain calls your attention to it. It's this link between the chemical changes, the brain's interpretation, and finally your awareness, that causes alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness -> continuation of increased attention level -> alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness -> increased attention level -> alertness -> stress -> reinforcement of alertness ... etc.
And round and round it goes. Probably a lot truth to this although kinda simplified.
Hjernen er alene!
 
I've started having lucid nightmares that end in brain zaps after getting reactive tinnitus. I believe it's because of what you posted. Here's an interesting article explaining what I mean
Mind you I never had an issue with nightmares beforehand and I didn't even know lucid dreaming was a thing. I think it is all connected to the neurons by oscillating correctly like you said
@Samir
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/45520-brain-zaps-trigger-lucid-dreams.html
Yeah I get ugly nightmares now too. This really may be the worst disease. All the more reason that the researchers need to abandon general methods of drug development and treat this like an emergency.
 
Didn't @Viking have this surgery?
Viking had the HiFU one by Professer Jeanmonod in Swiss.
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/hifu-high-intensity-focused-ultrasound-surgery.276/

The guys with the new paper. Vanneste, De Ridder etc. are basically the same guys behind the old Brai2n clinic in Belgium and have now restarted in Gent in Belgium with the new name Brai3n. They basically do the same thing but maybe now they have some better protocols regarding where to stimulate and not.
 

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