A New Sound

Last night Brandt and I were sitting in the living room playing on our laptops.  He was Earless (no hearing aids) and was typing along happily when suddenly he stopped, and whipped his eyes back and forth.  I thought maybe he had just read something that he was thinking deeply about, when he looked at me and asked,

“Based on your lack of a reaction, I’m guessing you can’t hear that noise?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “Nooo…  What noise?  What does it sound like?”  He thought about it and said, “It’s like a monotone… which is different.  Usually my tinnitus is like a static.”  “Both ears?” I asked.  He thought again.  “More in the right.”  “Hmm, that’s weird,” I said, “since your hearing is worse in your left ear…”  He laughed, sighed, and said, “Oh goodie, a new sound!  Isn’t this fun?!”

I thought I had fully researched tinnitus and the [lack of] treatments for it, but today I discovered a possible new treatment that is being explored at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.  Dr. John Dornhoffer is the director of both the Division of Otology and Neurology and the Hearing and Balance Center at UAMS, and suffers from tinnitus and hearing loss himself.  While researching treatments for “space motion sickness” in astronauts—which was funded by NASA—Dr. Dornhoffer discovered a possible treatment for tinnitus as well. 

By applying low-frequency, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the auditory cortex, Dr. Dornhoffer and his colleague Dr. Mark Mennemeier discovered that they could “reduce or eliminate tinnitus temporarily in over 50% of patients,” as reported in the medical journal The Laryngoscope in 2008.  Dr. Dornhoffer explains that they can locate the areas in the brain that perceive tinnitus, target that area with magnetic stimulation, and eliminate the tinnitus; but “the problem is, it doesn’t last very long—that’s the next step, that’s for the future.  Right now we know we can find it, we can localize it, we can make it get better, we just now need to ask the question, ‘How can we prolong the response?’.” 

There are only five Centers in the world working on this research:  two in Germany, one in Belgium, and two in the United States, and “all of us have the same common goal:  To help these patients.”  Here is a video of Dr. Dornhoffer explaining his research on tinnitus (unfortunately it isn’t captioned and the Transcribe Audio isn’t all that great—sorry!):

Dr. Mennemeier also has a video about tinnitus, although it is a bit harder to hear.

Keep up the amazing work, Doctors Dornhoffer and Mennemeier!