Can hearing aids suppress tinnitus?

Hearing aidCan you suppress tinnitus?

Tinnitus is the result of different pathological changes involving many diseases of the auditory system. The etiology is complicated and the mechanism is unclear. The main manifestation is that there is no corresponding external sound source or electrical stimulation, and subjectively has a sound sensation in the ear or in the brain. Clinically it is a concomitant symptom of many diseases and the first symptom of some serious diseases (such as acoustic neuroma). Tinnitus is a common ear disease, and the patient population is widely distributed among the elderly and the youth. According to statistics,20%The crowd is suffering from tinnitus,60The incidence of tinnitus in people over the age is as high as30%.80More than % of tinnitus cases are related to hearing changes. Other diseases that can cause tinnitus include head and neck trauma, systemic metabolism, and endocrine system diseases. A few cases of tinnitus have no clear cause.

The symptoms of tinnitus associated with clinical diseases usually disappear with the healing of related diseases, and generally do not plague patients for a long time. Tinnitus, which is clinically required to be treated specifically, is usually chronic tinnitus that has no clear cause or is difficult to cure due to the primary disease and has been present for more than half a year. Chronic tinnitus is common in sensorineural hearing loss and some chronic diseases that are unhealed.

Currently, there are two main types of tinnitus non-pharmacological treatment:

1The treatment of tinnitus and habits, that is, without changing the tinnitus, changes the reaction and attitude of the tinnitus patients to their tinnitus, psychological counseling, etc., adjusts the patient’s mentality and mood, thereby reducing the annoyance caused by tinnitus. However, due to the long treatment time and high price, it is greatly limited in clinical practice.

2Tinnitus masking treatment, also known as tinnitus sound therapy, aims to use the external sound to suppress the cochlea or auditory nerve An activity that enhances excitement. Hearing loss with tinnitus patients wearingHearing aidThat is to say, the principle is applied, that is, the surrounding sound is amplified, and the patient’s feeling of hearing the tinnitus is reduced.

Simple tinnitus patients often feel the tinnitus worse in a quiet situation, but it does not feel that it is outside the noisy situation, because the peripheral environmental noise has a masking effect on tinnitus. In patients with tinnitus with hearing loss, the masking effect of environmental noise on tinnitus is significantly weakened, so the feeling of tinnitus is more prominent. This is why the incidence of tinnitus in the elderly is high.

When a hearing aid is worn by a tinnitus patient, the background noise is appropriately amplified (such as turning off the noise reduction function)./Increase the low frequency gain; or increase the corresponding channel gain in the band that the tinnitus matches; or increase the lower band gain to mask up)Hearing aidCan play a role in masking treatment.

Many patients have bilateral tinnitus, and bilateral tinnitus are at the same frequency. Because the peripheral auditory pathway has a strict frequency distribution, the probability of bilateral bilateral auditory pathways occurring at the same site is extremely low, so bilateral tinnitus of the same frequency Almost all of them are central tinnitus. Patients with bilateral tinnitus wear only one sideHearing aidIt often only has an inhibitory effect on the ipsilateral tinnitus, but it is mostly ineffective for the contralateral tinnitus. This phenomenon is consistent with the auditory deprivation phenomenon. Therefore, bilateral hearing loss is accompanied by bilateral tinnitus, and it is best to wear hearing aids on both sides, which not only overcomes the phenomenon of hearing deprivation, but also effectively suppresses tinnitus.