An Electroencephalography-based Database for studying the Effects of Acoustic Therapies for Tinnitus Treatment

Abstract

The present database provides demographic (age and sex), clinical (hearing loss and acoustic properties of tinnitus), psychometric (based on Tinnitus Handicapped Inventory and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale) and electroencephalographic information of 89 tinnitus sufferers who were semi-randomly treated for eight weeks with one of five acoustic therapies. These were (1) placebo (relaxing music), (2) tinnitus retraining therapy, (3) auditory discrimination therapy, (4) enriched acoustic environment, and (5) binaural beats therapy. Fourteen healthy volunteers who were exposed to relaxing music and followed the same experimental procedure as tinnitus sufferers were additionally included in the study (control group). The database is available at https://doi.org/10.17632/kj443jc4yc.1 . Acoustic therapies were monitored one week after, three weeks after, five weeks after, and eight weeks after the acoustic therapy. This study was previously approved by the local Ethical Committee (CONBIOETICA19CEI00820130520), it was registered as a clinical trial (ISRCTN14553550) in BioMed Central (Springer Nature), the protocol was published in 2016, it attracted L'Oréal-UNESCO Organization as a sponsor, and six journal publications have resulted from the analysis of this database.

Fig. 1

Flow diagram based on the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials. In total, 108 participants were recruited, 103 of them accepted to participate in the study, and 71 of them completed the experimental procedure.

Fig. 2

Study design. The present database contains (1) demographic information, (2) clinical history, and (3) psychometric and (4) EEG monitoring of 103 volunteers, of which 89 of them suffered from tinnitus, and the rest of them were controls.

Fig. 3

(A) Electrode montage for EEG monitoring. Two pre-frontal (FP1, FP2), five frontal (F7, F3, Fz, F4, F8), four temporal (T3, T4, T5, T6), two central (C3, C4), one parietal (Pz) and two occipital (O1, O2) recording sites are provided in the present database. Reference (blue) and ground (yellow) electrodes are not present in the EEG recording. (B) g.tec system for EEG recording. The g.tec system consisted of an electrode cap of medium size, a biosignal amplifier (g.USBamp), and an electrical isolation system for electrode power supply (g.GAMMAbox).

Fig. 4

Experimental procedure. Acoustic therapies were monitored for eight weeks, along with four follow-ups. THI and HADS questionnaires were completed in S2, S3 and S4. EEG signals at resting state (baseline) for six minutes were recorded in S1 and S4. In addition, three minutes of EEG recording was undertaken in S4 when participants were listening to their corresponding acoustic therapy. PM for 2.5 minutes was recorded in all of the four sessions, and AM was recorded from S2 to S4.

Fig. 5

Representation of breakdown of the group, patients, and recording condition. All files are provided in GDF-format.

Fig. 6

Hearing condition and tinnitus characteristics. On the left, HL level of participants in left (y-axis) and right (x-axis) ears is presented. The HL level is categorized in seven impairment levels: (1) no impairment (0–15 dB), (2) slight HL (15–25 dB), (3) mild HL (25–40 dB), (4) moderate HL (45–55 dB), (5) significant HL (55–70 dB), (6) severe HL (70–90 dB), and (7) profound HL (>90 dB). On the right, acoustic characteristics of the tinnitus in terms of intensity, frequency and laterality are presented.

Fig. 7

Demographic information of the sample. On the left, sample age in three categories (young, adult, elderly) is presented, where can be seen that most of participants were in adult age (30–59 years). On the right, sample gender is presented, where can be seen that majority of participants were females.

Fig. 8

THI outcome for each group (placebo, BBT, TRT, EAE and ADT) in the three monitoring sessions (S2, S3 and S4). This questionnaire outcome is one of four conditions: light, mild, moderate, severe o catastrophic alteration.

Fig. 9

HADS outcome for each group (placebo, BBT, TRT, EAE and ADT) in the three monitoring sessions (S2, S3 and S4). This questionnaire outcome is one of three conditions: normal, abnormal and borderline abnormal. On the left, the stress-monitoring outcome is presented. On the right, the anxiety-monitoring outcome is shown.

Fig. 10

Individual alpha frequency of each volunteer participating in each experimental group. Placebo, binaural, TRT, EAE, ADT and control.