Thank you for your letters and ideas. Here, members share their thoughts about ATA and their opinions on tinnitus and treatments they have tried. We publish them with the hope that the information might be of help to others. Please read these anecdotal reports carefully. If you are interested in a treatment mentioned, consult with your health care profes- sional and together decide if a given treatment might be right for you. The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the letter writers and do not reflect an opinion or endorsement by ATA. Tinnitus Today readers want to hear from other readers! So please write to me at
editor@ata.org or Editor, Tinnitus Today, American Tinnitus Association, P.O. Box 5, Portland, OR, 97207.
Letters to the Editor
Dentist Cleaning and Tinnitus – A Response I’m writing in response to the Spring 2012 Tinnitus Today “Q and A” column, which discusses tinnitus related to dental cleaning. Just over a year ago I experienced tinnitus and hyperacusis following a dental cleaning with a sonic scaler. As it was being done I felt an intense pain deep in my ears; afterward I had a steady hum in one ear, along with an extreme sensitivity to noises coming from electric-powered devices (such as fan and refrigerator motors, fluores- cent light ballasts, electric transformers, etc.).
Hopf Amplifiers
In December 2010, I began to suffer from tinnitus. Since then, I have been searching for treatments and educating myself about my condition. As a new member of ATA, I am particularly interested in ATA’s Roadmap to a Cure.
As I have perused various articles about tinnitus on the Internet, I happened across some profound hearing- related research in the field of biophysics. In the 1990s, biophysicists and engineers developed an electro- mechanical model of how the cochlear hair bundles function to transmit sound to the brain. Biophysicists have determined that the hair bundles function as what is called a nonlinear “Hopf amplifier.” They understand where on the cochlea the hair bundles are located for each frequency. They also understand the chemical process that acts as a “gain” (volume) control on the little amplifier.
I suspect that the dental scaler overstimulated my ears at some harmonic of the 60 Hz frequency at which electricity is delivered in the U.S., leaving my ears hypersensitive to that frequency.
I joined ATA as a result of this experience, and I want to share a helpful hint: I found that noise-cancelling headphones gave my ears significant relief, apparently by giving them an occasional rest from environmental noise. The tinnitus and hyperacusis are much reduced since a year ago; symptoms still flare up when I’m exposed to a noisy environment, but the headphones help calm things down.
Regards, Marianne Lent Santa Clara, California ATA Member since 2011
In a 2004 lecture, Steven Chu, Ph.D., spoke of how these hair bundles are very delicately tuned, and how easily they can be set off balance. The delicate neuron gap can become permanently stuck in a closed posi- tion, resulting in tinnitus. I have been searching for ATA-funded research grants that mention “Hopf amplifiers,” but I’ve found nothing. It just seems that finding a cure to tinnitus may be “slam dunk” if an effort is made to assimilate knowledge from both the ATA and biophysics professional organizations.
Karl Hanson Glenview, Illinois ATA Member since 2012
Editor’s note: Currently, tinnitus research is approached from a multi-disciplinary standpoint because of the complexities of the condition. The research community applies scientific principles from many areas to glean anything “new” about tinnitus. The research that ATA-funds are typically a “seed” grant in which a grantee would prove or disprove a certain hypothesis. Continued on Page 14
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