A US based research team from the University of Illinois have published an imaging study that explores how different areas of the brain communicate in subjects with mild or severe tinnitus compared to subjects without tinnitus. The groups were further subdivided depending on whether they were exhibiting a clinically significant level of hearing loss. The team used an innovative investigation technique that involved presenting music to test subjects in between scanning cycles in order to attempt to naturalise the data recording.
It has historically been noted by a number of authors that individuals with bothersome tinnitus exhibit different connectivity strengths between brain areas responsible for auditory, attentional and emotional processing compared to people without the symptom. These functional neurological changes are associated with emotional distress caused by the symptom and associated threat monitoring.
This excellent paper adds to the story and provides a number of very interesting insights. The main body of data reveals that the more bothersome the reported tinnitus, the stronger was the exhibited inter- network functional connectivity. This study substantiates the essential role of the attention, salience, and limbic networks in tinnitus habituation, and suggests modulation of the attention and salience networks across the auditory and visual modalities as a possible compensatory mechanism for bothersome tinnitus.
These observations explain how habituation will most likely occur if a patient’s tinnitus distress can be reduced. As neurology is essentially plastic the network connectivity can change and as it does it is highly likely that patients will become more prone to experiencing the tinnitus signal being confined to their subconscious (or non-conscious).
Please see a link to this published work:
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