Comment by instagib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by instagib | Hacker News Reader

I have had several audiologists begin their speech of “as you may know tinnitus is from damage to the ear due to loud … “, well mine is from Covid.

I read about a study a few years ago that focused on shocking the tongue and its nice someone followed up on it. They described one year of relief post treatment.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201015173126.h...

Bimodal neuromodulation combining sound and tongue stimulation reduces tinnitus symptoms in a large randomized clinical study. Science Translational Medicine, 2020; 12 (564): eabb2830 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abb2830

Mine is constant and loud. If people speak and pause it gets difficult to orient where we’re at with the fire alarm sound going on in the middle of speech. Soft spoken people I have to fill in the conversation with guesses to what they said.

Hearing aids help but you’re not supposed to sleep with them in. So when you manage to fall asleep then wake up, it can be hard to fall asleep again or impossible.

Mine started after Covid too. The audiologist did some tests and found I have one ear having a section of frequencies with poor response.

His hypothesis is vascular damage due to Covid restricted blood supply to the hairs in that one part of the ear canal. The brain fills in the discontinuity from the resulting "notch filter" audio response (in Electrical Engineering terminology), and that hallucinated sound is the tinnitus.

I had it already, Covid made it much worse.

NHS tinnitus awareness course had a bit about accepting it as background noise (vs just concentrating on it and being annoyed), I rubbished that at first but it helped quite a bit in the end.

That was before Covid after that it's got much louder, it comes back whenever I think about it, so seeing the article brought it back, hopefully I can make it go again.

anecdote for anyone else reading about Covid related tinnitus - I've had hearing damage related tinnitus for a decade. Got Covid in April '22 which caused my existing tinnitus to 2-3x in severity, lasting a couple months before it either reverted to baseline or I got used to the new normal. Very scary experience. The CEO of Texas Roadhouse famously committed suicide due in part to severe post-Covid tinnitus.

For anyone struggling to cope with Tinnitus out there, one thing that has helped me immensely is Zen meditation. Doesn't make it go away, but builds up a control over attention with which you can cope much better.

Hearing damage is the most common cause, but it's far from the only one. It can also be caused by other sorts of physical damage (TMJ, blood pressure, etc.), certain drugs, and some diseases.

> diabetes, thyroid problems, migraines, anemia, and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have all been associated with tinnitus

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tinnitus/symp...

I don't find it the least bit surprising that Covid could also cause it.

Many causes listed here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8235102/

"...medicines used to treat other diseases, as well as foods and other ingested materials, can result in unwanted tinnitus. These include alcohol, antineoplastic chemotherapeutic agents and heavy metals, antimetabolites, antitumor agents, antibiotics, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, nonnarcotic analgesics and antipyretics, ototoxic antibiotics and diuretics, oral contraceptives, quinine and chloroquine, and salicylates. This review, therefore, describes the medications currently used to treat tinnitus, including their mechanisms of action, therapeutic effects, dosages, and side-effects. In addition, this review describes the medications, foods, and other ingested agents that can induce unwanted tinnitus, as well as their mechanisms of action."

Aspirin (and NSAIDs in general) might be one of the most common drugs that can cause it (see section 2.12.7 in the paper). Table 15 lists the drugs that can cause tinnitus. The paper seems like a thorough, recent (2021) review.

I got mine from a diving (snorkeling/free diving) accident. Barotrauma damaged my cochlea. I think Covid played a factor too. I was severely congested recovering from Covid at the time.

I got tinnitus after my second Pfizer shot (booster)

Anyone else speculating whether the shots somehow lowered our overall immune systems?

I also had it before but the 3rd vaccine shot amplified it maybe 3-5x for a few months, it was like a siren when trying to sleep, thank god it back to its normal level which I forget about most of the time.

I developed tinnitus two days after my third shot. Never had it before, and it hasn’t gone away since that day.

There are a lot of people who have had this side effect but its difficult to search for info without running into full blown conspiracy theories or people treating you like an anti-vaxer.

Absolutely. I’m about as far away from an antivaxxer as it gets, but I studiously avoid mentioning my personal side effects to the shot. You get suspicious looks from the left, and people on the right want to hold you up as proof that their antipathy for the vax is justified.

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