The treatment of annoying tinnitus with electrical stimulation.

I 'd like to discuss our experience with transcutaneous electrical stimulation as a treatment of tinnitus. I'd like to acknowledge my coauthor Gaye Cronin, who treated many of the patients in this study. Usually, the treatment of tinnitus is not easy. Electrical stimulation has been used to treat a number of disorders, including pain, tissue injury, circulation impairment, and the like. A number of authors have reported a decrease in tinnitus with electrical stimulation. This usually has been noticed in the treatment of profound hearing loss, using direct stimulation of the cochlea and, of course, this is not practical with the usual tinnitus patient. Encouraged with these results, and his own observations, in 1981, Chouard [1] reported 64 patients whom he treated with transcutaneous electrical stimulation for annoying tinnitus. He reported that 47% of his patients realized some improvement in their tinnitus. In 1989, Kuk [2] et al. reported using transtympanic electrical stimulation in lO patients for the treatment of annoying tinnitus . These researchers used currents up to 2 rnA and reported that 50% of the patients had improvement in their tinnitus with some residual inhibition.