Effects of hearing aid fitting on the perceptual characteristics of tinnitus

Abstract

Restoration of auditory input through the use of hearing aids has been proposed as a potentially important means of altering tinnitus among those tinnitus sufferers who experience significant sensorineural hearing loss. In animal models of neural plasticity induced by noise trauma, high-frequency stimulation in deafferented regions of the auditory spectrum has been shown to modulate cortical reorganization after hearing loss, a result which suggests that the neural basis of tinnitus is subject to interference by acoustic stimulation. This study drew on deafferentation models to investigate the effect of hearing aids on the psychoacoustic properties of the tinnitus sensation, using both conventional amplification and high-bandwidth amplification regimes. The tinnitus percept was affected only weakly in the conventional amplification group, and was not at all affected in the high-bandwidth group. The changes observed under conventional, low-to-medium frequency amplification may indicate that the perceptual characteristics of tinnitus depend on the pattern of sensory inputs - notably a contrast in activity between adjacent central auditory regions of more and less afferent activity - while the absence of modifications in the high-bandwidth amplification group suggests limit on the tractability of the tinnitus percept. This limit to the malleability of the tinnitus percept may arise from either the extent of hearing deficits or the duration and robustness of the neuroplastic changes that originally give rise to tinnitus.