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

Hidehiko Okamoto; Henning Stracke; Wolfgang Stoll; Christo Pantev

doi:10.1073/pnas.0911268107

New Research In

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.

Footnotes

³To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pantev{at}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.