What Makes Tinnitus Permanent?

What makes tinnitus permanent? Does damaged hair cells mean guaranteed permanent tinnitus? If I listened to loud earphones for the past few years does that mean it permanent for sure?

 

No one knows for sure.

 

I know that tinnitus is not permanent sometimes it just takes way tooooo long to go away sometimes even 20 years to go away, it depends, everyone is different, but the way research is going, people will be rid of it in a about 5 years or less

 

I doubt it. I'm sure there will be treatments soon that will reduce it but tinnitus sounds too complicated to be cured completely so soon. Maybe in 15 years.

 

Honest,y I believe 5 is causing the governments waaaaay to much money just on the vets disability payments and the problem is growing by leaps and bounds, it used to be more of a old people problem, but thanks to gaming headsets, beats audio, and what not, now you have young generation with this problem, so I think 5 years is good

 

The prevailing theory at present is that maladaptive neuroplastic changes happen in the thalamus, which is the party of the brain that's supposed to filter out excess information before your aware of it consciously. Everyone has a ton of extra noise in their sensory feed, at all times. If your thalamus is intact and you don't have extra noise was a result of ear damage, then you're not consciously aware of this excess data.

 

English please the only thing I understood is thalamus, I thought or saw on the news that scientists found the root of the cause of tinnitus

 

For myself it is for ever but due to a progressive disease Menieres.
I always live in hope their will be a cure for most medical problems .
Staying positive and loving life is me fighting back and staying strong ..... lots of love glynis

 

My layman's understating is that the information path for audio perception works something like this: vibrations of the ear drum cause specialized hair cells in the cochlea of the ear to release glutamate, which causes nerves connected directly to them to start sending information. Those nerves are connected to the auditory cortex in the brain, which generates a percept, the internal representation of the sound, which is what we hear consciously.

That information spreads out through the brain, and as I understand it, the thalamus has circuits in it which filter and transform the sound before or as we are aware of it. I've seen this described somewhere as analogous to an "active cancellation" system, such as Bose noise cancelling headphones.

People with intrusive tinnitus have been shown in a couple studies to have brain differences from people without tinnitus, without significant differences in hearing tests.

It's not just hair cells; most people over the age of 30 are missing some high frequency hearing, but 85% of them don't have tinnitus.

I'm sorry if that's too wordy or vague; I guess the bottom line is that the OP asked a very difficult question which can at best be partially answered, and not without getting vertigo from the depth of the material.

 

My question is what role do you think GABA plays in this theory? For me its evident it plays a role which has been confirmed via SPECT imaging in several severe chronic cases.

 

What about the the dorsal cochlear network? Does the sound get processed here before it is received by the auditory cortex?

 

GABA is the brakes in the system. There are long, spindly nerve fibers with GABA receptors on them that transverse the thalamus / insula. Dysfunction leading to hyperactivity is inherently tied to GABA/glutamate activity.

 

my T is not permanent.
i have no T when i sleep or in my dreams. my T starts 10 seconds after i woke up.
so not really permanent T

 

I have the exact same kind of T

 

I can hear mine when I wake up. Very faint for 10-20 sec and then Bam... Unmaskable torture for the rest of the day until I take my Remeron at night which takes it down a notch. Then, next morning again I am off to see if the fucking Groundhog sees his shadow...

 

this is how i wake up when i hear my T again

 

shit luck, essentially.

 

Since mine comes and goes - that is, it disappears completely for a few hours and this occurs each and every day, I also believe that mine is not permanent. One day it'll go and my brain just won't find it again.

 

I think in at least some presentations of tinnitus, there is the possibility for positive neuroplastic changes to occur.

The timeline is indeterminate. But the brain makes constant changes and adjustments, always. There's no magic button to access this. But I think we have some influence on the process with our choices and actions.

Anyway, it pays to make positive health changes regardless.

I don't think all tinnitus is permanent. It's just such a confounding thing <<--(please substitute your favorite expletive - or series of expletives -- for the word "thing"! ).

 

Agree. Its a brain processing issue that morphs over time, reaches a threshold and once the proverbial genie it out of the bottle, neuro firing develops memory. Scientists so far haven't figured out how to bend this complex arc and reverse this trend. Of course we try thru a host of techniques from chiropractic manipulation to sinus meds to dopamine related meds to meditation to countless dollars thrown at ENT's probing around our bodies without having a clue.. Like bringing a garden hose to a forest fire.
Tinnitus to me is so difficult to unravel because it relates to how the brain fires or rather misfires based many times relative to aging hardware...like cochlea's losing their hair count in different frequency zones...tympanic membranes losing their elasticity...neuro pathways that don't transmit electricity with the efficiency they once did hence forging different paths . We lose hairs in our cochlea throughout our lives. There are many hard of hearing without tinnitus. So it is largely how the brain fires but many other factors as well. To me, its based upon neuroplasticity that inexplicably goes off the track based upon a variety of genetic and environment factors as mentioned.

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=40362

 

I wish I knew!

All I know is that when I was 14, I had one of those old CRT TVs with the fat back that make that annoying high-pitched whine. One night, in the dark and the silence, I turned the TV off... but the high-pitched whine didn't stop.

No noise exposure (other than normal over-ear headphone use), no dangerous ototoxic drugs, no nothing, just chronic T and pain - and then a cocktail of psych. drugs (mostly SSRIs) to "help me cope" with the noise - which ultimately blew out some of my ability to think and made the T worse.

 

Well all I know is that we all have it What ever shape or form it come in. When there is a cure or there is some kind of medication that we can take to bring the noise down to a tolerable level. Boy!! Are We are we going to have one hell of a party!!!!

 

Nice thought but I believe too simplistic. If you watch the 'will a Tinnitus cure become available' thread of videos, the recurrent theme is tinnitus is a 'heterogeneous' issue. Translation, there are many moving parts with potentially many causes...some mechanical...some chemical which even changes brain chemistry and how neurons fire over time.
So there are different reasons for tinnitus and there won't be a miracle cure because at the end of the day, the brain processes the input it gets from its apparatus and likely no single drug will separate the sound we don't want versus the sound we do. There is a reason this hasn't been solved already or a given drug isn't administered like candy to separate out unwanted sound....its a really complex disease.

I will give you an analog in the human body. How does the brain process sight? How do we address eye problems? Eye problems are generally addressed mechanically...by operations on the eye which change its sensing ability...from cataract to Lasik surgery for example. Ever hear of somebody going temporarily blind or developing double vision during a Migraine attack? This is chemical and affects how the brain processes the mechanical information it receives from what might be perfectly good eyes.

So reasons for tinnitus are manifold and a single prong approach won't fix everybody's' T.

 

A quiet party!

 

Exactly!