Auditory experience, for a certain duration, is a prerequisite for tinnitus: lessons from subjects with unilateral tinnitus in the better-hearing ear

Prog Brain Res. 2021;260:223-233. doi: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2020.07.013. Epub 2020 Aug 14.ABSTRACTTinnitus has traditionally been considered an otologic disorder; however, recent advances in auditory neuroscience have shifted investigations toward the brain. The Bayesian brain model explains tinnitus as an auditory phantom percept. According to the model, the brain works to reduce environmental uncertainty, and thus the absence of auditory information due to hearing loss may cause auditory phantom percepts, i.e., tinnitus. As in animal studies, our recent human observational study revealed the absence of ipsilesional tinnitus in subjects with congenital single-sided deafness, suggesting that auditory experience is a prerequisite for the generation of tinnitus. Prompted by anecdotal cases, we hypothesized that subjects with acquired hearing loss would not develop tinnitus if their duration of auditory experience was not sufficiently long. We retrospectively enrolled 22 subjects with acquired asymmetric hearing loss and unilateral tinnitus in better ear (TBE). Twenty-two hearing threshold-matched controls with tinnitus in worse ear (TWE) were selected from our database of tinnitus patients. All 22 TBE subjects reported that their acquired hearing loss developed before the age of 20, and the reported duration of auditory deprivation in the ear without tinnitus in the TBE group was significantly longer than that of the TWE group. In other words, the TBE group with limited auditory expe...
Source: Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Source Type: research