I had the great pleasure of visiting a wonderful research team studying the neurological origins and treatment of tinnitus at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis last week. About 30 million U.S. citizens have tinnitus. For about 4 million of them, the tinnitus is identified as “severe” – which means that it is continuously disturbing and intrusive, makes normal sleep very difficult or impossible, has extended cognitive impacts, and grossly degrades the sufferer’s quality of life.
Dr. Jay Piccirillo and Dr. Harold Burton have conducted very important studies in tinnitus patients in their Wash U laboratories. After documenting the tinnitus and the neurological differences between normal individuals and patients with more tolerable (“mild”) or intolerable (“severe”) tinnitus, they sent 20 patients to the ‘brain gym’ to be trained in more accurate listening using Posit Science’s Brain Fitness Program. 16 patients had the stick-to-it-ness to complete the program. 13 of those individuals (more than 80%) had substantial relief from their tinnitus.
I met with four of those patients in St. Louis on Friday. They all told the same story. Their tinnitus had been seriously degrading their quality of life. Two were “severe” suffers. Their tinnitus was continuously annoying and destructive, and with them all through their waking hours. They were perpetually tired and disconnected because they could only sleep when they reached a state of exhaustion and near-collapse. Both “severe” and “mild” sufferers said that tinnitus bouts were substantially less frequent after training. All said that they had more control over their tinnitus, and could now ‘put it out of their mind’ at will. All said that it had greatly helped them sleep. All said that it had resulted in very substantial improvements in their quality of life.
Dr. Piccirillo measured the amplitude of the ringing or clattering sounds that these patients heard, and explained that he did not believe that this the tinnitus loudness had been consistently altered by Brain Fitness Program training. What changes is 1) the frequency with which tinnitus rose to consciousness in ways that disrupt an individual’s effective operations at work or in their personal life and 2) the intrusive, disturbing power of the tinnitus. After training, it was far easier for these patients to willfully ignore their tinnitus when it did arise, putting it in its proper place as meaningless noise, not to be attended to.
It was very interesting to hear the two individuals who had ‘mild’ tinnitus describe what it meant to bring their tinnitus under control. I was struck, once again, by the cavalier way that a doctor can use of the word “mild” to describe something that I’m just damn glad that I do not have to endure. Just as for more severely affected individuals, these ‘mild tinnitus’ sufferers described major life-improvement consequences of completing Brain Fitness Program training.
Three of these four patients also vividly described improvements in listening and language abilities, in their attentional control, and in memory and other cognitive abilities resulting from Brain Fitness Program training. Those changes are important because Dr. Burton’s and Dr. Piccirillo’s studies of the brains of these patients document clear evidence of tinnitus-induced brain changes that translate into accelerated cognitive loss. Tinnitus very commonly affects we older folk. It is pretty clear that it is another burden that accelerates our progressive decline. It was wonderful to see that both anti-tinnitus benefits and cognitive recovery were both recorded after BFP training.
It was interesting to see that strong benefits appeared to have been retained in these individuals for at least many weeks after they had completed training. All still had a good level of ‘control’ of their tinnitus. We have to wait to see if further training will be important to keep it under control. Retraining every so often may be necessary. Only time will tell.
We are excited by these results at Posit because we believe that we can augment these effects — and likely still further reduce both the intrusiveness, and the magnitude of the ringing in the ears itself. We are now working hard to evaluate the effectiveness of these new-and-improved strategies. It is also exciting to have discovered such a wonderful team of scientists to work with, to help us in the search for a still better solution for dealing with this very common from of quality of life deterioration, distress – and often, torture.T
In the meantime, with this preliminary evidence of strong benefits, if tinnitus plagues YOUR life, you might think about initiating Brain Fitness Program training, because there would appear to be a good likelihood that it may be a source of real help for you.
I found that my tinnitus was caused by mercury. It reduced significantly after I removed all the mercury fillings from my teeth and took supplements to remove the mercury from my brain. Occasionally when more mercury comes out than can be eliminated by my body, the tinnitus will start up again. Mercury gave me APD as well, which was also cured after I removed my mercury amalgams.
Dr Mezernich, I have great faith in you, and I would to know your opinion of Robert Sapolsky on his studies that steroids damage the hippocampus. I have 55 years and suffer from tinnitus since I was between 10 and 15. It has recently been made ??permanent and it sounds very high. I could never sleep. Also I have no memory, and I think that it is because I was subjected to steroids since I was 3 years because of my allergies. Can you tell me something please.
I am an otologist in practice little outskirts of Chicagoland. I am one of your great admirer. This is what I tell the patients about their tinnutus, of course it is largely affected by knowledege cummulated by neuroplasticity, mindfulness exercises and research on OCD. I tell my patients with normal hearing first this the sound you hear is not different from a thought comes to your mind or a dream you see while sleeping. You can not control what you will see at night for dream and your tinnutus is the same way. I tell them this is not a sign of a disease or organic problem. This helps them to relabel and reatribute the tinnutus. I remind them also they can not turn on or off this sound too. Only thing they can do is not let them nervous when they hear the sound. I go back the dream example, if you see a bad dream you usually not think about it constantly, you can always remember it if you want but most you will prefer to not remember and contrary if you want to learn something new you keep repeating until becomes a talent. So I tell patients please knot that you heard that part of your brain making this sound and acknowledge but also tell yourself “so use your own will” this sound do not mean anything. This step is revalue the tinnitus, For the last step tell them shift your mind to something more pleasant such as nice music or talk show or relaxing songs. This step refocus. And ask them try to do this at least three weeks ( I think this was your opionion that at 3 weeks needed for new connections in brain establish) and assure them the sound will not be as bad as used to but if they really wanted to find out it will be always there, like a old friends name may not come to your mind when you first see him/her years later but will pop up later. I wonder what you think about my tinnutus retraining method, thank you
I love your phrase “this step is (to) revalue the tinnitus”. As we work iteratively to strengthen the effects of our training, we have been focussing more and more on assisting the individual in their recognition that their tinnitus is NEVER important, ALWAYS meaningless and insignificant, NEVER to be granted the exaggerated attention that does not deserve. You’re a wise advisor to your patients; to a large extent, we are trying to implement another version of your strategy in our program.
I am a patient and in sheer desperation because there were no treatment opportunities left, I developed my own kind of personal brain training method. It was in no way professional, but became a great success for me. Here is my story:
I first experienced “my” tinnitus several years ago. It took me a couple of nights to grasp, that the disgusting buzzing noise, that disturbed my sleep and threatened my health, was an “inside-me-incident” and not an outside environmental noise event. The subsequent medical treatment (anticoagulants, steroids) made it even worth and the otolaryngologist and the neurologist soon dismissed me from therapy as an imaginary invalid, suffering from a kind of nothing, that could not be recorded in a sustainable way and therefore might not exist.
The only left alternative for me was to help myself, and really hard thinking about the nature of my symptoms and their disastrous consequences brought me up to the idea, that I had two problems, first the disturbing noise itself and second the lost of control which demoralized me.
Following this I tried to imagine a method to get back into control first. I didn’t expect that I would be able to control the noise itself, but besides all the suggestions about relaxation training because tinnitus is/was seen as a stress related problem, I tried out to drown the awful buzzing sound from inside my head with a an even louder and worse, but coherent radio noise (with no adjusted program but the frequency noises) from outside. To accomplish this I plugged my radio enabled Mp3-player into my tinnitus ear. This wasn’t comfortable either, but there was nothing for me to loose. My first success was to get back into control. As a second idea I tried to fix this sound with a comfortable imagination: I told to myself that this noise is a really heavy summer rain behind my open window and that I was very lucky to stay in my secure house and lie in a cozy bed. My motivation for salvation from my tinnitus despair was high enough for this to succeed very fast. I was able to sleep for more than two hours at a stretch and I soon recovered from a very bad mental and healthy state to a much better one. I had to sleep with this radio noise and summer rain association for some month. After that time the tinnitus disappeared slowly, but reappeared several times within the following two years. But with the same “method” immediately applied, it vanished even sooner and longer until now I have not noticed it for more than a year: Eureka!
I think my brain was involved in all this, the cause as well as the development of the method as well as the cure. Amazing! I would like to tell this story to other tinnitus patients who are distressed and have no idea how to solve their very hard problem.
Wíth this personal experience I can easily imagine that the here proposed brain training has high potential for success too.
I wish you the best of luck with your recovery.
My husband suffers from tinnitus, and I would like to help him with this information. Can you give more details, or tell where more details can be found, about how to use the Brain Fitness product to achieve some relief from the tinnitus? Or should he simply use the product in the usual way? Where can I get info about the number of hours participants used the product, or any area they focused on to achieve these results?
Many thanks!