Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity — PNAS

Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity
Hidehiko Okamotoa,1, Henning Strackea,1, Wolfgang Stollb,2 and Christo Panteva,3
+ Author Affiliations

aInstitute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, Westfalian Wilhelms-University, Malmedyweg 15, Muenster, Germany
bDepartment of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Muenster University Hospital, Kardinal-von-Galen-Ring 10, 48149 Muenster, Germany
Edited by Michael M. Merzenich, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, and approved December 3, 2009 (received for review September 30, 2009)

↵1 H.O. and H.S.contributed equally to this work.

Abstract
Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.

cortical plasticity human auditory cortex lateral inhibition magnetoencephalography MEG
Footnotes
3To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pantev@uni-muenster.de.
Author contributions: C.P. and H.O. designed research; H.O. and H.S. performed research; H.O. and H.S. analyzed data; and H.O., H.S., W.S., and C.P. wrote the paper.
↵2 Deceased August 8th, 2009.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at
www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0911268107/DCSupplemental.


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Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity — PNAS
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