Notched Sound Alleviates Tinnitus by Reorganization Emotional Center

Application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in tinnitus research: contemporary insights and perspectives

Tinnitus, characterized by phantom sound perception, is a highly disruptive condition lacking clearly effective treatments. Its complex neural mechanisms are not fully elucidated. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a promising neuroimaging tool well-suited for assessing tinnitus due to its quietness, portability, and ability to directly measure cortical hemodynamic responses. This study timely summarizes the recent applications of fNIRS in investigating tinnitus pathology, correlating neuroimaging biomarkers with symptom severity, and evaluating treatment efficacy. Further studies with larger samples are warranted to reproduce existing findings. Thus, fNIRS appears to be a promising tool in tinnitus research. Addressing technical limitations, optimizing control groups, advancing data analysis, integrating standardized, and individualized experimental protocols can facilitate the extended and robust utilization of fNIRS in tinnitus research.

Tinnitus and Multimodal Cortical Interaction

The term of subjective tinnitus is used to describe a perceived noise without an external sound source. Therefore, it seems to be obvious that tinnitus can be understood as purely auditory, sensory problem. From a clinical point of view, however, this is a very inadequate description, as there are significant comorbidities associated with chronic tinnitus. Neurophysiological investigations with different imaging techniques give a very similar picture, because not only the auditory system is affected in chronic tinnitus patients, but also a widely ramified subcortical and cortical network. In addition to auditory processing systems, networks consisting of frontal and parietal regions are particularly disturbed. For this reason, some authors conceptualize tinnitus as a network disorder rather than a disorder of a circumscribed system. These findings and this concept suggest that tinnitus must be diagnosed and treated in a multidisciplinary and multimodal manner.

Comparison of Different Therapeutic Effects of T-MIST for Chronic Idiopathic Tinnitus

Objective. Tinnitus, as a common clinical symptom, has the characteristics of high incidence and great heterogeneity among different patients. As one of the common treatment strategies for tinnitus, this study is aimed at exploring the factors influencing tinnitus sound therapy and the correlation between different tinnitus acoustic characteristics. Methods. 315 patients with chronic tinnitus were enrolled and divided into three groups according to the tinnitus multielement integration sound therapy (T-MIST): (1) vanishing, (2) remission, and (3) unchanged. The general characteristics, psychoacoustic scores (tinnitus handicap inventory (THI) and visual analog scale (VAS)), residual inhibition (RI), degree of hearing loss, and tinnitus characteristics of each group were compared. Finally, we analyze the predictive significance of different features for acoustic effects. Results. The frequency of tinnitus in the vanishing group was higher than that in the remission and unchanged groups ( $P<0.05$ ). There were no differences in age, initial onset time, course of the disease, and VSAD between the vanishing group and the unchanged group ( $P>0.05$ ). High-frequency tinnitus may predict the vanishing of tinnitus after treatment ( $P<0.05$ ), but the degree of hearing loss, tinnitus characteristics (loudness and frequency), and psychoacoustic score (THI and VAS) were only weakly correlated ( $P<0.05$ ). Residual inhibition test (RI) was an independent risk factor for the efficacy of acoustic therapy ( $P<0.001$ ). Conclusion. The patients were divided into three groups by T-MIST treatment effect; Kruskal-Wallis test and chi-square test were used to compare the baseline information of each group. Then, we analyzed the correlation between patient characteristics and psychoacoustic scores. Finally, logistic regression was performed to explore predictors that might influence the treatment effect. High-frequency tinnitus may have a better therapeutic effect; age, disease course, and other factors can not be stable explanation factors for a poor therapeutic effect of tinnitus. The residual inhibition (RI) test was an independent factor in predicting the efficacy of T-MIST.