Journal of Phonetics & Audiology
Open Access

Sound Therapy in Chronic Tinnitus Patients

Ankmna Hartley^{* *}Correspondence: Ankmna Hartley, Department of Audiology, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, Karnataka, India, Email:

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Description

Tinnitus, which is the sense of phantom noises that do not come from external sources, can significantly lower a person's quality of life. Tinnitus patients frequently have audible hearing loss. The relationship between hearing loss and tinnitus is complicated, though, because only a small portion of those who have hearing loss also have tinnitus, and some persons with tinnitus do not have significant hearing loss. Despite the complicated link between hearing loss and tinnitus, restoring the lost auditory stimulation has been one of the most popular treatments. Amplification (hearing aids), sound therapy (sound generating devices), and "combination hearing aids" that offer both amplification and sound treatment are the three subcategories of sound stimulation. The current investigation was limited to sound therapy. Tinnitus-related distress has been observed to reduce with sound therapy while habituation increases, demonstrating the steady lowering of an emotional response to and knowledge of tinnitus. However, the true value of sound therapy and the processes underlying reductions in tinnitus have remained mysterious. It has been suggested that sound therapy may generally have an impact on cognitive functions.

Behavioral paradigms have been used in the past to examine attention problems in tinnitus sufferers. The effects of tinnitus on selective, sustained, or split attention were shown in a number of these researches. According to other studies, people with tinnitus have less executive control, or the capacity to distinguish between information that is relevant to their tasks Tinnitus patients had attentional deficits and many paradigms that have been used to study attention in tinnitus patients may help to explain these inconsistencies between the findings. Researchers have shown the requirement for a systematic paradigm that is dependable and uses the same test to evaluate each attention system subcomponent in order to address this problem. The Attention Network Test (ANT), which is based on a verified attention model, is an illustration of such a paradigm. According to the model, attention can be divided into three distinct attentional networks: (1) the "alerting network," which is in charge of maintaining alertness; (2) the "orienting network," which is in charge of shifting attention from one stimulus to another; and (3) the "Executive Control (EC) network," which is in charge of deciding which information is relevant to the task at hand. The ANT is a visual attention task that assesses each attention network and how well it interacts by measuring Reaction Time (RT) and accuracy. Researchers compared the attention networks of participants with tinnitus and a group of healthy control subjects using the ANT. The EC network showed a difference, indicating that tinnitus patients struggled more to move their focus between task-relevant and irrelevant information.

Therefore, a visual attention test rather than an aural one was chosen. The importance of an attentional measure that was based on a systematic, trustworthy attention paradigm that has previously been used to assess attention in a population of tinnitus sufferers was also emphasized. The ANT was used to assess the attention networks in a group of chronic tinnitus sufferers before, after, and after long-term sound therapy sessions (15 minutes of listening) (2 months of listening). A matched control group without tinnitus was used as a comparison point for the baseline and short-term therapy measurements.

Conclusion

Additionally, it was hypothesized that after receiving long-term sound therapy for tinnitus, the EC differential index would fall in the tinnitus group, indicating that the patients would become better at switching between task-relevant and irrelevant information, and that the fall in the EC differential index might be related to the treatment response.

This study show that long-term usage of sound therapy can help individuals with tinnitus who are experiencing distress linked to their tinnitus, but they also show significant individual variability in the treatment's effects. This suggests that either sound therapy needs to be further customized and enhanced, or that it only helps a specific subset of tinnitus patients. The classification of tinnitus patients into subgroups still requires more research. The changes in tinnitus-related distress are not associated with changes in any of the visual attention networks. This shows that sound therapy's positive benefits on the suffering connected to tinnitus may be due to other causes.