Frontiers in Neuroscience

Residual inhibition, i.e. the temporary suppression of tinnitus loudness after acoustic stimulation, is a frequently observed phenomenon that may have prognostic value for clinical applications. However, it is unclear in which subjects residual inhibition is more likely and how stable the suppression can be induced repeatedly. The primary aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of hearing loss and tinnitus chronicity on residual inhibition susceptibility. The secondary aim was to investigate...

IntroductionThe effectiveness of tinnitus treatment represents a huge gap in the medical science. Acamprosate is a glutamatergic antagonist drug and GABA-agonist that could be used to control tinnitus due to its action on peripheral and central neurotransmission. PurposeTo assess the effectiveness of acamprosate in the treatment of tinnitus. Material and MethodsThis is a systematic review and we searched for randomized clinical trials linking acamprosate to tinnitus in six databases: Cochrane ...

ObjectivesListening effort and fatigue are common complaints among individuals with hearing impairment (HI); however, the underlying mechanisms, and relationships between listening effort and fatigue are not well understood. Recent quantitative research suggests that the peak pupil dilation (PPD), which is commonly measured concurrent to the performance of a speech-in-noise task as an index of listening effort, may be informative of daily-life fatigue, but it remains unknown whether the same is ...

ObjectivesTo investigate if the anxiety associated with COVID-19 is a promoting factor to tinnitus. MethodsA retrospective research design was used to compare the clinical characteristics of tinnitus between the patients in 2020 under pandemic pressure and those from the matching period in 2019. While anxiety was quantified using the Zungs Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), tinnitus severity was evaluated using the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) questionnaire and the test of minimum masking le...

IntroductionThe auditory phantom sound perception tinnitus is accompanied by maladaptive neurophysiological changes. In tinnitus treatment, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is applied to counteract these pathological alterations. Previous work showed that single-session rTMS can reduce tinnitus loudness and modulate tinnitus-associated oscillatory brain activity. This study aimed to contribute to this research branch by addressing previous methodological shortcomings, includin...

BackgroundTinnitus is defined as the perception of a sound without a corresponding external acoustic stimulus and is considered a symptom rather than a disease. In some individuals, it can be evoked or modulated by input from the somatosensory, somatomotor, and visual-motor systems. This has led to the introduction of the term: somatosensory modulation of tinnitus. In these cases, the psychoacoustic attributes of tinnitus (loudness and pitch) can change as a result of external stimuli such as ...

ObjectiveThe goal of this pilot MRI study was to understand how focal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting auditory cortex changes brain function in chronic tinnitus. MethodsPeople with chronic tinnitus were randomized to active or sham tDCS on five consecutive days in this pilot mechanistic trial (n=10/group). Focal 4x1 tDCS (central anode, surround cathodes) targeted left auditory cortex, with single-blind 2mA current during twenty-minute sessions. Arterial spin-labeled an...

BackgroundTranscranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) aims to induce cortical plasticity by modulating the activity of brain structures. The broad stimulation pattern, which is one of the main limitations of tDCS, can be overcome with the recently developed technique called High-Definition tDCS (HD-TDCS). ObjectiveInvestigation of the effect of HD-tDCS on tinnitus in a large patient cohort. MethodsThis prospective study included 117 patients with chronic, subjective, non-pulsatile tinnitus ...

ObjectivesThis study aimed to investigate changes in auditory processing using auditory steady state responses (ASSR) in patients with idiopathic tinnitus. Method19 tinnitus patients and 23 control subjects without tinnitus were examined with multiple ASSR. Three modulation frequencies of 20, 40, and 80 HZ were tested and the steady state responses were compared between tinnitus and control group. Further, the thresholds in ipsi- and contralateral side to ear with tinnitus were compared. Resul...

ObjectiveUpcoming neuroscientific research will require bidirectional and context dependent interaction with nervous tissue. To facilitate the future neuroscientific discoveries we have created HarPULL, a genuinely real-time system for tracking oscillatory brain state. ApproachThe HarPULL technology ensures reliable, accurate and affordable real-time phase and amplitude tracking based on the state-space estimation framework operationalized by Kalman filtering. To avoid data transfer delays and ...

Methods based on psychoacoustical forward masking have been proposed to estimate the local compressive growth of the basilar membrane (BM). This results from normal outer hair cells function, which leads to level-dependent amplification of BM vibration. Psychoacoustical methods assume that cochlear processing can be isolated from the response of the overall system, that sensitivity is dominated by the tonotopic location of the probe and that the effect of forward masking is different for on- and...

BackgroundTinnitus affects 10 to 15 percent of the population, but its underlying causes are not yet fully understood. Hearing loss has been established as the most important risk factor. Ageing is also known to accompany increased prevalence, however, the risk is normally seen as a consequence of (age-related) hearing loss. Whether ageing per se is a risk factor has not yet been established. We specifically focused on the effect of ageing and the relationship between age, hearing loss and tinni...

The spatial percept of tinnitus is hypothesized as an important variable for tinnitus subtyping. Hearing asymmetry often associates with tinnitus laterality, but not always. One of the methodological limitations for cross-study comparisons is how the variables for hearing asymmetry and tinnitus spatial perception are defined. In this study, data from two independent datasets were combined (n= 833 adults, age ranging from 20 to 91 years, 404 males, 429 females) to investigate characteristics of s...

Auditory grouping relies on the ability to bind tones with coherent spectral features over time to form auditory objects. Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) degrades spectral resolution, and the extent of this degradation varies with the listening configuration. However, it remains unclear how SNHL impacts auditory grouping and whether different listening configurations affect this ability. This study investigated task performance and cortical activity during auditory object detection in four gro...

Severe motor impairments such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and locked-in syndrome lead to partial or complete loss of speech, severely restricting communication as voluntary motor control deteriorates. In this study, we developed a non-invasive, wearable EEG-based brain-computer interface that reconstructs coherent natural language sentences by decoding linguistic components directly from neural activity. EEG data were collected from 20 healthy volunteers using two bilateral temporal electro...

PurposeTo evaluate the feasibility of detecting single-trial cortical responses to individual microperimetry (MP) stimuli using electroencephalography (EEG) under non-ideal synchronization conditions, and to explore EEG-based stimulus registration independent of patient responses. MethodsThis proof-of-concept study acquired EEG data from two healthy participants (12 trials) during MP testing using low- and high-intensity single-flash stimuli. Occipital EEG signals were recorded with an 8-channe...

ObjectivesThis study investigated the relationships between the cochlear nerve (CN) health and sentence-level speech perception outcomes measured in quiet and noise in postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users. DesignStudy participants included 28 postlingually deafened adult CI users with a Cochlear(R) Nucleus device. For each participant, only one ear was tested. Neural health of the CN was assessed at three or four electrode locations across the electrode array using two param...

ObjectiveTo evaluate the reliability and generalization of NeoNaid, a fully automated software tool for neonatal EEG analysis, based on functional brain age (FBA) estimation and sleep staging. MethodsNeoNaid combines a multi-task deep learning model with proposed quality control routines detecting artefacts, out-of-distribution inputs, and uncertain predictions. Based on a raw EEG input, it outputs one global FBA estimate and a continuous 2-state hypnogram. We validated performance on an two in...

Subjective tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of an external source, with a neurobiological basis that remains poorly understood. Importantly, tinni-tus prevalence increases with aging, reaching up to 25 % in adults aged above 65 years. This study examines white matter tract alterations in older adults with tinnitus using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. The research involved 96 individuals from the Chilean ANDES cohort, including 56 patients with tinnitus and 40 controls. T...

PurposeReal-world evidence (RWE) is of practical significance as it enables the evaluation of whether findings observed in rigorously controlled clinical trial settings are generalizable to routine clinical practice. While Lenire, a bimodal neuromodulation tinnitus treatment device, has demonstrated efficacy and safety within controlled trials, further RWE from clinics is needed to reinforce these results. This is the first real-world study to assess the therapeutic effects of Lenire on tinnitus...