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Review
. 2021 Dec;22(6):609-621.
doi: 10.1007/s10162-021-00815-1. Epub 2021 Oct 22.

Too Blind to See the Elephant? Why Neuroscientists Ought to Be Interested in Tinnitus

Marlies Knipper  1 , Birgit Mazurek  2 , Pim van Dijk  3   4 , Holger Schulze  5
Affiliations
Review

Too Blind to See the Elephant? Why Neuroscientists Ought to Be Interested in Tinnitus

Marlies Knipper et al. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2021 Dec.

Abstract

A curative therapy for tinnitus currently does not exist. One may actually exist but cannot currently be causally linked to tinnitus due to the lack of consistency of concepts about the neural correlate of tinnitus. Depending on predictions, these concepts would require either a suppression or enhancement of brain activity or an increase in inhibition or disinhibition. Although procedures with a potential to silence tinnitus may exist, the lack of rationale for their curative success hampers an optimization of therapeutic protocols. We discuss here six candidate contributors to tinnitus that have been suggested by a variety of scientific experts in the field and that were addressed in a virtual panel discussion at the ARO round table in February 2021. In this discussion, several potential tinnitus contributors were considered: (i) inhibitory circuits, (ii) attention, (iii) stress, (iv) unidentified sub-entities, (v) maladaptive information transmission, and (vi) minor cochlear deafferentation. Finally, (vii) some potential therapeutic approaches were discussed. The results of this discussion is reflected here in view of potential blind spots that may still remain and that have been ignored in most tinnitus literature. We strongly suggest to consider the high impact of connecting the controversial findings to unravel the whole complexity of the tinnitus phenomenon; an essential prerequisite for establishing suitable therapeutic approaches.

Keywords: attention; fast auditory processing; hyperacusis; parvalbumin positive interneuron; stress; tinnitus.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Words dropped during the discussion round at the Annual Mid-Winter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology on the 25th of February, 2021 that were automatically selected and ranked by a computer algorithm which analyzed the transcript of the discussion
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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