Tinnitus and Patterns of Hearing Loss

[erik]

Tinnitus and Patterns of Hearing Loss

Tinnitus is strongly linked with the presence of damaged hearing. However, it is not known why tinnitus afflicts only some, and not all, hearing-impaired listeners. One possibility is that tinnitus patients have specific inner ear damage that triggers tinnitus. In this study, differences in cochlear function inferred from psychophysical measures were measured between hearing-impaired listeners with tinnitus and hearing-impaired listeners without tinnitus. Despite having similar average hearing loss, tinnitus patients were observed to have better frequency selectivity and compression than those without tinnitus. The results suggest that the presence of subjective tinnitus may not be strongly associated to outer hair cell impairment, at least where hearing impairment is evident. The results also show a different average pattern of hearing impairment amongst the tinnitus patients, consistent with the suggestion that inner hair cell dysfunction with subsequent reduced auditory innervation is a possible trigger of tinnitus.

 

[Louise]

Sounds like it could be down to IHC damage then.

For me personally I think it was too much damage at once. Maybe if the damage builds up slowly over time it doesnt trigger T but when it all hits at once then it does. That's my theory on what happened to me anyway.

 

[Dhaval]

Sounds like it could be down to IHC damage then.

For me personally I think it was too much damage at once. Maybe if the damage builds up slowly over time it doesnt trigger T but when it all hits at once then it does. That's my theory on what happened to me anyway.

That could be true but then what do you think happens to people who recover from tinnitus even after several years.

 

[jazz]

@Dhaval Those people have not recovered, they have habituated. In other words, the damage still exists but the consciousness has learned to tune it out. I know two people with tinnitus who no longer hear it. I know a few others who hear it only when they search for it. Both are forms of habituation. But you can't control habituation; you can help it along through the many tips given on TT. The good news is that most people (80-90%) do habituate after 1-2 years so that the noise is either no longer heard or is no longer significant.

 

[t-man]

For me personally I think it was too much damage at once. Maybe if the damage builds up slowly over time it doesnt trigger T but when it all hits at once then it does. That's my theory on what happened to me anyway.

That may be the case. Most people I know have job related hearing loss but no tinnitus. I'm wondering if hearing damage is accumulated gradually over a long period, the brain adjusts to it.

Over in the career topic, most all of you work outside careers that deal with machinery.

 

[Dhaval]

Hope I am of the 1st type. I think it depends on how much attention you end up paying to it along with the extent of the damage.

 

[carlover]

Why some and not others with hearing loss got tinnitus interested me. Through research I found out that the loss of High Freq on a graph that looks like a ski slope graph indicates that you will have Tinnitus with that loss...as i have.

http://www.hearinglosshelp.com/articles/kindsofhearinglosses.htm