In this project, Kate Yukonovich in Dr Will Sedley’s lab at the University of Newcastle is developing a reliable way to ‘objectively’ measure tinnitus, to understand tinnitus and evaluate the efficacy of treatments more effectively.
Project start date: June 2019
Project end date: June 2022
About this project
The top research priority highlighted by people with tinnitus is always to find a treatment to stop it. A major limiting factor is that we do not have a reliable way to ‘objectively’ measure tinnitus – a way that isn’t affected by a personal judgement, either by the person with tinnitus or the person measuring it.
This makes it very difficult to study tinnitus effectively, or to measure any changes in people’s tinnitus following treatment. This means that we cannot reliably monitor the effectiveness of tinnitus treatments.
Developing an objective test for tinnitus will help us understand the mechanisms underlying tinnitus, which new treatments could then target.
In theory, if a person has tinnitus, the tinnitus sound will influence how they hear actual sounds present in their environment. For instance, imagine a sequence of short sounds playing one after the other with silent gaps in between. The tinnitus sound will ‘fill in’ the silent gaps, and so the person will hear a single ongoing sound. This can be seen in changes in the electrical activity of the brain, which is easily measurable from a person’s scalp.
How it works
Initial work by Dr Sedley has shown that measuring changes in brain activity when someone is listening to a sequence of sounds can tell the difference between people with tinnitus and people who do not have it.
In this project, Kate will use a brain imaging method called electroencephalography (EEG) to measure changes in brain activity of people with and without tinnitus while they listen to sounds. She will improve the test and assess how reliable it is over time (that is, do you get the same result in the same person on different days?).
Kate will also evaluate the test’s ability to tell whether a person has tinnitus or not and whether it can track changes in tinnitus, from when it begins to when it develops into chronic tinnitus, over time.
What have we learned so far?
This project has helped researchers better understand how the brain processes sound in people with tinnitus, and whether these brain responses could be used as an objective test for the condition.
The team found that people with tinnitus do show differences in their brain responses to unexpected sounds, but the picture is more complicated than first thought. Hearing loss, hyperacusis, attention and the exact design of the test can all influence the results, so more work is needed before this approach could become a reliable tinnitus test.
The work also explored a new type of sound therapy that can be tailored to a person’s tinnitus and delivered fully online. Read more about smartphone sound therapy in this article.
About the researcher
Kate Yukonovich completed her PhD in Dr Will Sedley’s lab at the University of Newcastle. Her PhD studentship was fully funded by the Freemason’s Charity.