Tinnitus suffering IV. - Concentration difficulties

Anxiety, depression and lack of sleep - all that inevitably brings concentration difficulties (decreased ability to focus on doing something). Although concentration problems could have anyone, by tinnitus it is more serious: not only severe inability to concentrate on work, but often also concentration during talk with friends or colleagues is disturbed. The work remains unfinished or poorly done, communication is complicated. To ease concentration difficulties one must at first alleviate the symptoms of other mentioned mental disturbances.

Tinnitus suffering III. - Sleep disorder

source: flickr

By tinnitus is at most affected your sleeping. A lack of sleep escalates depression, anxiety and creates concentration difficulties. It is simply a serious problem, that can surely erode overall health a life quality. Without enough sleeping may arise health problems and also many aspects of life are complicated. Due to low performance at work one could lost his job. Because person suffering from tinnitus looks generally healthy, thus other people could consider him lazy and think, that he only constantly using various unreal excuses. Overall reliability at work or in social life is downgrading, relationships are getting worser.

Use of melatonin can help - 3 or 5 mg taken before bedtime. Ringing in the ears should be masked, using nature sounds, silent noise, music from the radio or a combination of these things - personally use all three at once. Also, use of benzodiazepines - drugs for anxiety, can have a positive effect.

Anatomy of human ear II. – How work hair cells

Although I am no scientist, I can understand basic principle of hair cells functioning. They are cells of special type and their purpose is to transform mechanic sound waves of acoustic pressure into electrical signals, which is send through Cochlear nerve into hearing centre of brain. On the surface of hair cells there are hair-like projections – stereocilia. Stereocilia are stimulated by incoming sound wave and start to vibrate (they are bending back and forth), and that leads to generating electrical impulses through changes within the hair cells.
Because of aging, hair cells are losing stereocilia and with them also sensitivity to sound – that is natural process. But that could happen also in one moment when one is exposed to acoustic trauma.

Video on functioning of stereocilia in laboratory conditions:



Keep in mind:

One must always keep in his mind, that heavily damaged hair cells die and are replaced with so called support cells. Human hair cells, in contrast with birds, fishes or reptiles, does not regenerate naturally, and up until now there is no known way to regenerate or to stimulate growth of new hair cells medically. Therefore one has to constantly take care about own ears, especially while visiting discotheques, night clubs, music concerts, shooting ranges, fireworks, motorcycles... etc.

More detailed information about hair cells:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10867/

Notched music therapy

Notched music therapy is one of the therapies that are used to relieve ringing in the ears. It belongs to the group a Sound therapies, representing mainly Tinnitus Retraining Therapy and Residual Inhibition.

Notched music therapy works on the basis of theory that tinnitus is a result of maladaptive plasticity in the central pathway auditors. The original tinnitus signal is most often triggered by hearing loss. Based on the auditors neural input deprivation, the excitation-inhibition balance in the central auditors pathway is disturbed, most probably by the weakening of inhibitors networks. Consequently, maladaptive brain changes lead to neuronal hyperactivity, increased neuronal synchrony, and possibly burst firing. All these phenomena have been shown to be associated with the tinnitus perception.

Principle of Notched music therapy is quite simple - the patient chooses music according to his taste, which is adjusted so that frequencies corresponding to his own tinnitus are removed. 

This therapy is applicable not only to music files, according to one study it had a good results with removing tinnitus frequencies of white noise (called windowed sound therapy - WST):

http://www.tinnitusjournal.com/detalhe_artigo.asp?id=48

Conclusions of the WST study are questionable, because they did not confirm that the WST significantly reduced subjective tinnitus volume, but its effectiveness can not be entirely ruled out.

I have not tried Notched music therapy and although I cannot dismiss positive results for some patients, I do not trust this therapy too much. It contradicts the theory of residual inhibition, which I had successfully tested and use it for now. But who knows...? Tinnitus is still "unexplored land" and thus cannot be excluded, that after a intensive and sufficiently long use of Notched music therapy some patients may show positive results.

Most common tinnitus cause III. - Dangerous decibels

source: freeimages.com

Noise is actually the sound pressure measured in decibels (dB) - who is interested in detailed information can read, for example, more on Wikipedia . The main thing that interests us is that decibels are measured logarithmically. In case of sound pressure it means that for every 3 decibels more it has double the energy. For example, the sound with intensity of 13 decibels two times more "noisier" than the sound with intensity of 10 decibels. Sound intensity 16 dB is 2x louder than the sound intensity 13 dB and up to 4 times louder than the sound of an intensity of 10 dB - etc.

Healthy human ear can usually register sounds for intensity of 0 dB - this is the threshold point. Some extremely sensitive individuals can hear sounds even weaker and theoretically should have gone in the measurement of auditory sensitivity to minus values. Simply, the human ear is extremely sensitive organ and is not designed for prolonged toleration of loud noise.

It's good to remember :

Danger to human hearing begins at around 85 dB. Normal human ear can withstand continuous noise of this intensity without damage for about 8 hours a day. Every 3 dB more, shortens time by half. So e. g. 91 dB is a safe value for only two hours a day, then we should take a rest for the day. Of course it also depends on the sensitivity of a particular individual, someone can endure more, someone less. Noise with an intensity of 130 dB and higher causes hearing damage almost immediately.

Tinnitus suffering II. - Depression

source: flickr

As tinnitus persists for a longer time span, anxiety is gradually replaced by depression accompanied with despondency, hopelessness and loss of meaning of existence. Tinnitus removes from life all joy and cheer. I personally went through it and know what it is. Depression is a worse condition than anxiety, one will neglected himself and completely loses all his interest for future and life. At this stage it is necessary to have the support of his loved ones. However, it has one advantage - for it shows you, who are real friends and who not. You can find true value of relationships and the people around you.

What to do about depression? There are a lot of antidepressants, but be careful. Tricyclic antidepressants could make tinnitus worse - I personally have not tried any antidepressant just because of this. So if you want to do it like me, my advice for depression are as follows:

1. Sport is good. During intensive sport activity your body releases hormones of happiness, it can get you in the mood for hours. Personally, I use to go jogging and body workout.
2. Start living healthier. Adjust diet. Skip some meals, especially with increased content of sugar and reduce pastries. Stop smoking and drink alcohol only to a limited extent, or skip it altogether. Drink a soothing herbal teas.
3. Hobbies – try to find more time for hobbies. It will be not easy, but it turn off the depression at last.

Meniere`s disease

Vincent van Gogh (dutch painter)
suffered Meniere's disease.

Meniere's disease or Menier syndrome is one of causes of tinnitus accompanied also with dizziness (vertigo) and fluctuant hearing loss. Source of these problems is not yet exactly defined, it is assumed that this syndrome relates to autoimmune disorder, when human body itself continually eliminates cells of vestibular system; it could be related to increased pressure in inner ear as well as to consequence of some infection.

Symptoms, such as dizziness and partial hearing loss in lower frequency range (in contract with acoustic trauma, by which there is hearing loss in middle and high-pitched frequencies), are temporary, but in case of not being cured they could escalate and become persistent. One can repress them by balanced food with plenty of vitamins and also using vasodilating medications.

More info on this issue:

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/balance/pages/meniere.aspx