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Brain Activity and Tinnitus



Exposure to short periods of very loud noise can cause tinnitusÑa persistent ringing or buzzing in the ears that cannot be blocked out. Tinnitus may affect around 10%Ð15% of the population; severe tinnitus is very debilitating (1%Ð2% of the populatio...

The human ear is essentially a very sensitive vibration sensor, one that is able to receive the minute longitudinal vibrations in air that make up sound waves. It can detect sounds from 20 Hertz (Hz) (very low pitch) to 20,000 Hz (very high pitch) bu...

Some studies in both animals and humans have suggested that tinnitus and hearing loss may be related. These studies have found that neurons in regions of the auditory cortex that have been deprived of stimuli because of hearing loss change their rece...

One of the key research targets in tinnitus has been investigation of cortical activity, especially in animal models of tinnitus, but studies in humans have been rare. Previous studies have identified temporal and frontal temporal changes in individu...

In this month's PLoS Medicine, Nathan Weisz and colleagues studied 17 patients with chronic tinnitus and hearing loss and 16 control individuals with normal hearing. Patients were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the impact of tinnitus on their...

The team's methods differed from previous work in that the team chose to examine the power spectrum of neuromagnetic oscillatory activity during rest, whereas previous studies had focused on measuring neurophysiological responses following sounds.

Normally in awake and healthy subjects a certain rhythm of brain activity at 8Ð12 HzÑthe so-called alpha rhythmÑis dominant. Finding enhanced slow-wave, or delta, activity (<4 Hz) in awake subjects is usually a sign of a dysfunctional neuronal networ...

This is the first study to show these changes in delta and alpha spontaneous cortical activity, say the authors. But they concede it is still unclear whether the enhancement of delta activity compared with alpha is the abnormal activity perceived as ...

Tinnitus-related distress as assessed by the questionnaire was strongly associated with this abnormal spontaneous activity, especially in the right temporal and left frontal areas, thus pinpointing a possible tinnitus-related cortical network.

A limitation of this study was that the tinnitus group also had high-frequency hearing loss, whereas the control group did not; the ideal control group would have been patients with the same sort of hearing loss but no tinnitus.

In discussing their findings, the authors suggest that their study supports previous work indicating that the prefrontal cortex is a candidate region for integration of the sensory and emotional aspects of tinnitus. Further studies should focus on fr...