What Are the Most Common Tinnitus Frequencies? Data from My Company's Database

[Peter Phua]

Hey everyone,

I'm not 100% sure if this is the right part of the forum to post this in, but I thought I'd share some data on a question I haven't yet seen answered in the literature (if anyone else has found a paper on this, please post it here).

That question is as follows: what is the distribution of tinnitus frequencies among people who have tinnitus? Are some frequencies of tinnitus more common than others?

I should disclose that this isn't "research" quality data, but it's still better than nothing. I run a commercial site where people can create sound therapy for their tinnitus based on their tinnitus frequency. So we mined our database to see what the common tinnitus frequencies were and this is the result:

This chart was produced from active accounts only, and with the most recent tone from that account (to filter out people who were just experimenting with the tuner). Further, we cut out tones below 50 hZ and above 20,000 hZ. What came out was roughly a normal distribution. The total sample size was about 1,300 tones.

Thought you'd find this interesting.

Disclosure: also posted about this on our blog here.

 

[Xorthian]

Thats actually very interesting since standard audiogram testing goes up to 8khz and it looks like distribution is almost equal so there is a high chance maybe someday audiology will start to care about higher frequencies too

 

[Peter Phua]

I was fairly shocked that there's a normal distribution, frankly.

 

[DogWhistle]

Has anyone done a poll on this forum?

I'm comforted by how many people are up there in bat-ears territory with me. Mine is somewhere between 11,000 and 14,000.

I'd also like to see more studies to determine which frequencies correlate with which causes. For example, is the average frequency for TMJ sufferers very different from the average frequency for noise-induced tinnitus sufferers? Are particular frequencies more likely than others to be permanent?

 

[Peter Phua]

Interesting questions. Maybe as part of our site signup we should ask people more questions.

 

[MichaelO]

Many observations in nature conform to normal distributions. By definition everything that is not completely random and hence a flat distribution or a single value within all of the samples it is 'normal', as I understand the math term.

 

[Peter Phua]

That's a good point!