Friday, January 29, 2010

A clever treatment for tinnitus

Okamoto et al. find that they can reduce brain activity related to tinnitus by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which has been modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency:
Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.

2 comments:

  1. I read about this before but, as a sufferer of mild tinnitus, what I want now is a program that can strip those frequencies out of songs for me. Should be easy to do and I could listen to my favourite songs without those frequencies on my way to work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ditto. Where do you get it? I guess you need a personal tinnitus profile then you could use Audacity to knock out the frequencies.

    ReplyDelete