Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a common disease in modern societies and may lead to maladaptations within the auditory system that finally result in subjective tinnitus. Available therapies may only alleviate the symptoms rather than restore normal hearing. In a previous study we demonstrated that the prophylactic application of Ginkgo biloba extract EGb 761® significantly reduces NIHL an...

Only few previous studies used ecological momentary assessments to explore the time-of-day-dependence of tinnitus. The present study used data from the mobile application "TrackYourTinnitus" to explore whether tinnitus loudness and tinnitus distress fluctuate within a 24-h interval. Multilevel models were performed to account for the nested structure of assessments (level 1: 17,209 daily life a...

OBJECTIVE The objective is to see how chronic tinnitus sufferers who are unmanageable to maximized medical therapy can benefit by decreasing their subjective complaints from a sleep evaluation and treatment. However, the proper identification of these particular patients has not been described well in the literature when attempting to correlate these 2 diagnoses. Thus, tinnitus patients with an...

Clinical observations suggest that tinnitus is modulated by stress. However, there is little empirical data to support the link between stress and tinnitus. In this study, we measured the stress hormone cortisol to examine the reactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in tinnitus participants as well as in healthy controls without tinnitus. Eighteen participants with tinnitus ...

OBJECTIVE Subjective tinnitus is hypothesized to arise from aberrant neural activity; however, its neural bases are poorly understood. To identify aberrant neural networks involved in chronic tinnitus, we compared the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns of tinnitus patients and healthy controls. MATERIALS AND METHODS Resting-state fMRI measurements were obtaine...

BACKGROUND The phantom auditory perception of subjective tinnitus is associated with aberrant brain activity as evidenced by magneto- and electroencephalographic studies. We tested the hypotheses (1) that psychoacoustically measured tinnitus loudness is related to gamma oscillatory band power, and (2) that tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related distress are related to distinct brain activity pa...

Subjective tinnitus is characterized by the perception of a sound which has no acoustic source in the environment. Often, this phantom sensation is described as a “ringing” or “buzzing” in one or both ears. Nearly all adults will experience tinnitus at some point in their life, albeit perhaps only for a short time, and most likely as a consequence of exposure to loud noise. For ~10% of the gene...