Tinnitus Treatment from Neuromod
lenire.com
lenire.com
It's currently in phase 2a [2] and results come out next year [3].
[1] https://hear2tell.com/2020/09/29/frequency-therapeutics-fx-3...
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04120116
[3] https://www.hearinglosstreatmentreport.com/estimated-fx-322-...
I thought it was ridiculous when I first saw it but I took a chance on it and it is actually a great product. You can clearly see everything and clean without damaging your ear. If you've ever had to go to the doctor to clear a blocked ear, you need one of these. With occasional use (~once/month) your ears will never be blocked again.
I also get mild tinnitus for the last 6 or so years due to earwax (once it got completely blocked and I had to go to the doctor to have them irrigate it back out).
I don't use cotton or any scraping right now, but I do use the same stuff the doctor used to irrigate it every once in awhile, to middling effect.
Maybe I'll try out that ear scope thing.
The endoscope is faster, easier, more comfortable, and makes it possible to clean when the ear is not actually plugged and verify that it worked.
The vast majority of poor and lower middle class Indians dont go to a doctor, they just go to an ear cleaner who sit on the streets and will do the job for you in 5 to 10 minutes for a dollar or two.
There are plenty of other stories about ruptured ear drums though: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/search?q=eardrum&restrict_sr=o....
I dislike flushing my ear with a syringe or squeeze bulb as it is uncomfortably loud and it seems possible to damage the eardrum with overpressure. It is also difficult to tell if it is working or how long you should continue doing it to ensure a clean ear, especially if the ear is not completely blocked.
The endoscope is faster, easier, more comfortable, and lets you see exactly how clean your ear is so there's no guesswork.
Sticking something pointy in your ear seems to carry its own risks. How do you ensure you don't puncture your eardrum?
https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%A4%E3%83%A4%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B...
But more interesting all the recommendations listed on Amazon. Tons of them, many 1/2 the price of the one above, but use your phone as the display
I haven't tried any of the phone based endoscopes but I expect the latency and reliability to be bad. When I'm controlling something that's deep in my ear canal I don't want latency or dropped frames.
Otonomy's OTO-413 drug (to fix the ribbon synapses in the cochlea) also seems really promising (results are due out next month). However, for their phase I/II study they're not testing for tinnitus and are actually excluding patients with "bothersome tinnitus". I'm hoping they see the same thing as Frequency and that some patients report improved tinnitus. These two drugs together (regrowing hair cells and ribbon synapses) seem like they could be a good one-two punch against hearing loss and tinnitus.
>Around the same time, another scientific group found very similar cells in the cochlea – but with one big difference: in the cochlea, these cells weren’t active. They saw that the cochlea’s cells didn’t regenerate and form new sensory hair cells. “So that was the formation of Frequency,” LeBel explains. “And Frequency was asking, why is that the case? Why is it that the cochlea isn’t regenerating cells and the small intestine is?”
>This led to the discovery of two small molecules that make up FX-322, which targets these cells, called progenitor cells. Essentially, this process is meant to drive hair cell regeneration: The drug targets pathways to those cochlear cells, and when activated, they divide and form a new cell of themselves, called daughter cells. “And then most importantly, they form a new sensory hair cell,” LeBel says.
That sounds incredible. If it really can reliably do what they claim with no significant negative side effects, that'd seem like one of the most "miraculous" treatments I've heard of in a while, both in terms of the technique and what it could accomplish.
I have no clue if that has any remote basis in reality, though. And perhaps your brain would eventually learn to sort it all out, so maybe any increased sensory sensitivity would generally be a net plus either way, once enough time passes.
A treatment that happened to have application to both male hair loss and hearing loss due to cochlear damage would be a really weird coincidence.
The distance the sound wave travels into the organ is related to whether it is a high pitched or low pitched sound. The hairs are essentially "dumb", they only trigger the neuron firings when they detect the vibration.
So regenerating the hairs in the cochlea definitely won't change one's "natural" hearing, but for those that have had missing or damaged hairs for a long time, there'll definitely be an adjustment period where the brain has to re-learn how to interpret the new input. (About 2 weeks or so)
>Auditory hair cells are specialized along the length of the cochlea to respond to specific sound frequencies. ... Each of our roughly 16,000 hair cells is dedicated to a narrow frequency range. These cells are ordered along the basilar membrane according to the frequencies they detect. [1]
In that sense, they're dumb in terms of just encoding oscillation patterns, kind of like an electric guitar pickup, but even though a pickup is "dumb", you can get different results depending on the placement and type.
I'm just wondering if and how the newly generated hair cells somehow fit in where they're needed, and how general or controllable the process is.
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hearing...
In age-related "hearing loss," the threshold of sensitivity rises while the threshold of pain stays the same or even decreases slightly. So the range of volumes you can comfortably discern becomes narrower. This explains why simply increasing the volume often does more harm than good. What's really needed to treat hearing loss is frequency-specific volume compression.
For most topics I recommend dr Jo as a starting point Bob and Brad if they want to step up the game.
I clench, have a mouth guard, but still clench. Don’t know of other treatments but would love to find one. I have tinnitus either as a result or from a bike accident which hurt my jaw and started the clenching.
For me, the ringing is only noticeable when it is quiet, so bed time is annoying. I run a small fan for the white noise to compensate. Other times of the day, music is playing while I'm working (not headphones).
See also https://bgr.com/2017/02/08/mercedes-pre-safe-sound-pink-nois....
I would like to know what all those triggers are so I can try to avoid them. Some are obvious - real loud noises, heavy exercise, etc, but others not so much.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tinnitus/symp...
> This study showed that there is significant loss in the
> dominant ear compared to the non-dominant ear (P < 0.05).
> Chronic usage mobile phone revealed high frequency
> hearing loss in the dominant ear (mobile phone used)
> compared to the non dominant ear.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918279/
Anecdotally, a hearing test performed after many years of having my earpiece in my right ear found that in the vocal frequency ranges my right ear has some hearing loss. (It was not like that before.) Which may or may not be coincidental.
It's not a stretch to think that holding a speaker–which is often far louder than it should be–right up to one's ear for extended periods every day could cause tinnitus in that ear.
- I did not sleep enough
- I wake up in the middle of my sleep
- I drink a lot of alcohol
- There is a lot of noise arround me
- In few cases it's just random and get stronger for no apparent reasons
And sure enough, one of the overhead fluorescent lights had an electrical humming coming from it.
And it became hard to study from that moment forward.
I'm apparently fairly adept at putting it to the background these days, because I mostly don't notice it except for when it's particularly quiet, or something specifically triggers my awareness of it. Certain sounds in certain frequency ranges trigger it off too. My youngest kid had a playful shriek thing she did that would palpably hurt me and cause it to kick off.
Seeing this post on HN itself is triggering and I'm now very conscious of the high pitched ringing sound.
I would be willing to pay good money to be cured of this.
There may be something here, but their presentation leaves a "snake oil" impression. Mostly because of their repeated emphasis on "CE" certification, as though that had any bearing on the effectiveness of this treatment. They even say it has "CE-mark certification for the treatment of tinnitus", which is really misleading, as CE simply means it complies with certain regulations regarding the construction of electronic devices, nothing at all about fitness for a given medical purpose.
Though I believe neuromod is advertising CE compliance not ‘China Export’
However it does not seem comparable to a fairly rigorous FDA double-blind experimental process requirements, it only requires the manufacturer to provide a clinical evaluation that appears to be just a little more than a literature review [0][1]
[0]https://www.emergobyul.com/services/europe/ce-certification
[1]https://www.emergobyul.com/sites/default/files/eu-meddev-2_7...
When my Tinnitus is particularly piercing, I imagine it as a radiant bright white line in my head. I then mentally begin to reduce the radiance of the light until it is gone. This dulls the sound immensely, I'm still aware of it but it no longer hinders me.
For bonus points, I use a similar technique for getting rid of ear worms. In that case, I mentally put the song into a wooden box, close the lid and let it fall into the sea. Works every time.
https://rewiringtinnitus.com/ also provides some in book and audio form, where you visualize your tinnitus as a knob you can turn or a person making the noise.
Doesn't really work for me though, though sometimes it does seem like I can "tune" my tinnitus a bit.
So, the question is, what percentage of people can be relieved with this?
I would read such a book. Sharing your experiences can help others begin to understand what survivors like you have gone through.
My emails in my profile if you'd like to chat with me.
He's never, ever, talked to me or my sister about it.
But has been on TV more than once about it.
I can't even begin to imagine what you went through, but the brain has strange defence mechanisms when it comes to dealing with stuff like that.
I'm sure people would read it, but that doesn't mean you have to write it if you don't want to.
I was transported back to my 8 year old self learning about speed of sound by looking at smoke appearing in the distance and counting seconds until I hear the explosion and multiplying by 300 to get the distance.
Also learning the different sounds explosions make depending on where they land (soft ground, hard target, different calibre or type of munitions)..
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/lenire-—-user-experienc...
Did someone lick the terminals of a 9V battery and realize their tinnitus changed for the better?
>Hubert Lim, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, hit on the role of the tongue in tinnitus by accident. A few years ago, he experimented with using a technique called deep brain stimulation to restore his patients’ hearing. When he inserted a pencil-size rod covered in electrodes directly into the brains of five patients, some of those electrodes landed slightly outside the target zone—a common problem with deep brain stimulation, Lim says. Later, when he started up the device to map out its effects on the brain, a patient who had been bothered by ringing ears for many years, said, “Oh, my tinnitus! I can’t hear my tinnitus,” Lim recalls.
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/head-mounted-device-for...
I definitely want to dive deeper into Lenire to see how or if it differs.
1 Hearing tests have always indicated I have excellent hearing. 2. The ringing doesn't bother me, even in extremely quiet environments. Speaking of, the most peaceful quiet I've encountered was in a bamboo forest somewhere in middle China. I'll never forget the utter silence.
(pretty sure my Tinnitus was from a certain Metallica concert..)
It would be easy to test and demonstrate that the ANC system is properly band-limited and doesn't cause any short term (perhaps imperceptible) noise spikes. I would think any engineer designing this kind of gear would be wary of causing hearing damage by making a design that works the way you suggest.
My Oncologist said it would get better over time, and it has, but its still far off from where I was when I started.
Also, I really hate reading about tinnitus because it just reminds my brain to stop ignoring that ringing sound...
Definitely a sloppy design, changing so many variables between the groups. No active control (maybe vibration on the tongue or something). To me the conclusion is that the general method probably works, but almost everything the actual device is overkill, from the 32 different leads to the "proprietary algorithm" and you could do the same thing with just one lead and probably some random tone played over airpods.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC128822/#!po=32....
My tinnitus is fairly minimal but I'd love to try both of these devices.
When you put a finger in each ear and create overpressure or underpressure, does the pitch change?
Does it change when you clench your teeth?
Is it louder on one side then on the other?
Maybe there are different types of tinnitus that we could describe better if we had some dimensions/categories like the above in which we could categorize our specific type of tinnitus?
Clenching my teeth has always given me a tinnitus-like experience but it never bothered/interested me until I got "real" tinnitus. I understand this form of tinnitus is related to the temporomandibular joint
For me, alternating frequencies give some relieve but fortunately. I use the "tonal tinnitus therapy" app for this. I'm not sure if this is part of the mentioned new therapy (which includes electrical stimulation of the tongue?)
Judging from other peoples experiences, my tinnitus is relatively mild anyway (but still bothers me)
Als, my ENT doctor, when looking into my tinnitus complaints, asked if there's a difference when heartrate increases (and possibly bloodpressure?). This does seem to be an indication of some specific cause. For me it doesn't.
Mine is a constant high-pitch whine in one ear, a very constant frequency, unaffected by mouth movements or poking at my ear. Others get very different or varying frequencies, or pulsatile tinnitus - https://www.tinnitus.org.uk/pulsatile-tinnitus
It can seem loud when I'm somewhere quiet, but with a bit of background noise and while focused on something else, my brain seems to manage to tune it out.
(The absolute worst thing for it seems to be reading about and thinking about tinnitus... so it's probably time to go and read something else...)
This famous reddit trick[0.] for at least temporarily curing tinnitus seems to lend credence to this idea. It essentially involves making noise near the skull, which presumably does temporarily stimulate the auditory nerve even if the ear drum itself is not able to correct create a signal.
My tinnitus has nothing to do with my ear drum, and interestingly enough this trick does not work for me.
I suspect curing tinnitus would require understanding a lot more about how nerves work and how to simulate sending an auditory signal without actually sending one.
0. https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...
A short story about my debugging after frustration with the conventional medicine.
One day after I came back from work it started in one ear, lasted for half an hour and went away for few minutes and came back to stay. I had no other symptoms, no pain, nothing. Visited a few ENT, a neurologist, had MRIs - all clean, no tumours no other problems. No hearing loss, no other problems with the ears.
The only thing that seemed to help was a nice hot shower. According to the articles I read on reputable sources, it must have been the running water sound that's masking it but I was better for a period of time after the shower and I couldn't reproduce the effect with recorded water sound.
So I conducted an experiment: I would use cold water to see if it helps. It did not. It wasn't the sound it was the heat that was helping, the relaxation of the cold shower.
But I did not had any neck problems? Yes, lately my posture wasnt great and I was having longer than usual time in front of the computer but I had no pain or anything like that. Anyway, I looked for massages and so on and discovered this technique on Youtube about tapping behind your head with your fingers. The method did not work for me but as I was trying it out I discovered that if I do a massage to a specific parts of my neck the tinnitus will get much less louder and even change tonne.
So one day I had a stiff neck, It lasted for days so I went to a doctor and she gave me muscle relaxants and painkillers. Wow, it turns out the muscle relaxants not only make my neck mobile again but the tinnitus got much better!
Now I was sure, it must be about my neck! Previously noticed that the tinnitus got better on vacation but I speculated that it was about the stress. Now I start thinking that it was about my sitting position.
Got myself an external keyboard, a nice monitor and laptop stand so I began using my computer the way that those leaflets about proper sitting position recommend. I did the neck exercises too and the tinnitus that no one was able to do anything about almost disappeared if few months. Every now and then it will come back but I know exactly where to rub to make it go away. It's not completely gone and at some sleeping positions it would come back louder but before finding a way to manage it I was thinking that my life is over because I coldn't think anything without thinking about the sound in my ears.
Pay attention to your sitting position people! It's no joke. The pain is nothing, you can be tough and not care, you can take painkillers and manage it but Tinnitus is something different. It is in your head, you can't cut it off and you can't take a pill to make it go away for a while. It's one of the most horrible things, it consumes you, makes you worse person because you couldn't sleep well since years, you cannot engage in deep thinking where one ide takes you to another idea. It's like working in an open office space next to the server room.
Get yourself a nice stand if you are using a laptop, use external keyboard a mouse/trackpad so that you can sit straight.
EDIT: @mrtksn, thank you for editing and elaborating your post.
I remember reading that one way of treating it would be lace your fingers behind your neck and do a flicking motion onto your neck with your fingers. Could be imaginary but it seemed to help. YMMV
For the record, I take great care on computer ergonomics so I've, at least, have that covered. And yes, Tinnitus is a curse.
Anyway, The orthopedist gave me this leaflet with the exercises illustrated. Pretty basic stuff and in Turkish but the illustrations are good enough:
https://ibb.co/XWnTZVB https://ibb.co/r6PBbTK
You apply pressure for 10 seconds each, repeat 3 times before moving to the next one.
These are intended to strengthen up the neck muscles.
This tinnitus crap showed up to me randomly while working in an open office at the beginning of this year (I wasn't wearing headphones or anything) and a bit after COVID started acting up all over the world and I've been WFH since. As a consequence of this, I think I might not be able to ever return to a regular open office. Really funny timing if one thinks about it.
I usually listen to broadband white or brown noise while a work. My favorite is this simulation of spaceship engine hum https://youtu.be/TvUHt54Ucrg but I'm going to check out AudioNotch since it can be tuned to my particular tinnitus frequency.
It's not clearly indicated as a side effect, but it's very clearly the cause.
This is a neurological disease, no amount of nerve stimulation will ever help. I am a sufferer.
The older comments here are quite suspicious.
Tinnitus can be caused by a neurological disease
Tinnitus can also be caused by incredibly tight/weak neck muscles such as the scalenes/SCM
Tinnitus can also be caused by high blood pressure - literally from hearing the blood.
Tinnitus can also be caused by compression of blood vessels - such as the subclavian artery (subclavian bruit) - often due to induced turbulent flow through the area.
Tinnitus can also be caused by something such as a cerebrospinal fluid leak.
Educate yourself.
Many people cured of CSF leaks or something like Thoracic Outlet Syndrome in which a scalene muscle is cut report decades of tinnitus being somewhat or completely relieved after surgery.
Tinnitus is caused by many, many things - some of which are cured from random things that people don't realize is going to have effect.
However, if you do have one of few neurological disease causes/damaged hairs, that shit definitely sucks and I don't think there's much hope yet aside from earbuds playing a matched frequency. I've actually heard of a good amount of success for some with supposed damaged hairs in that line of treatment - have you ever attempted to try it?
Not my intent to sound like a dick. I've had pretty severe tinnitus for now half of my life and I'm quite young. Shit sucks.
And even when it's a symptom of nerve damage there are things that can help. My tinnitus got a lot better when I started using a hearing aid.