Most common tinnitus cause II. - Prevention, first aid and treatment of acoustic trauma

source: freeimages.com

If anyone has been the victim of acoustic trauma, he or she should act within 48 hours, but ideally within 24 hours! Did you woke up after a noisy concert hard of hearing? Have you been watching live fireworks? Someone threw a firecracker under your legs and whistles blow in your ears? Go straight to your ear doctor, preferably directly to the hospital. Keep in mind that there is time in play.

If your audiologist is a professional, he will send you to the hospital. Ideally, after necessary examinations (audiometry and tympanometry) to determine the degree of hearing damage, you receive cocktail of glucocorticoids, vitamins and vasodilating agents intravenously. Glucocorticoids have anti-inflammatory effects, improving the nourishment of cells and increase the chances, that traumatized auditory cells recover. However, they also have lot of side-effects, but only with prolonged use. Usually overall it is ten drips, one drip per day.

Big doses of NAC and Magnesium as soon as possible after acoustic trauma are very effective too. See study on this issue: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24396768.

If you are not hospitalized and taken intravenous therapy only outpatient, try to use hyperbaric chamber for additional treatment. At a pressure of 2.5 atmospheres blood plasma gets several times more oxygen than the normobaric pressure. Oxygen`s diffusion into tissues helps prevent damaged hearing cells and avoid apoptosis (neuro-sensory cells in the inner ear breathe only by diffusion). Reportedly, at 3 atmospheres, the level of oxygen in the plasma is so big that organism could survive without blood cells.

If you do all of this on due time, you have a great chance that your hearing gets almost to its original state and prospective tinnitus can disappear.

NOTE: Above procedure applies even in case of Idiopathic sudden hearing loss (hearing loss that is due to unknown causes). When you lie down to sleep in the evening and in the morning you wake up deaf - usually affects only one ear.