Research News
The neurostimulator plays specific stimulating sequences into the ear of the patient. Photo: ANM - Adaptive Neuromodulation GmbH
The neurostimulator has now been developed and approved as a medical device by the research centre's licence partner ANM Adaptive Neuromodulation GmbH and is being distributed by the latter. Patients contact ANM directly.
Patient Hotline:
Tel.: 0221-454 6333, info@anm-medical.com
More information about the neurostimulator:
www.helmholtz.de/fzj-neurostimulator-studie The neurostimulator has now been developed and approved as a medical device by the research centre's licence partner ANM Adaptive Neuromodulation GmbH and is being distributed by the latter. Patients contact ANM directly.
Patient Hotline:
Tel.: 0221-454 6333, info@anm-medical.com
More information about the neurostimulator:
Alleviating tinnitus with sounds
Tinnitus can be excruciating: The annoying noises are caused by pathological synchronous firing of neuron clusters in the brain. Prof. Dr Peter Tass of Forschungszentrum Jülich and his team have developed a "neurostimulator" which plays certain stimulation sequences into the patient's ear in order to bring these pathologically synchronous neuron clusters out of sync. From June 2009 to July 2010, Tass and his colleagues treated a total of 61 patients with chronic total tinnitus with the neurostimulator. For the study, they divided the subjects into a total of five groups. In four groups, the duration and number of stimuli varied whereas the fifth group received a sham treatment. The first treatment phase lasted twelve weeks, followed by a four week interruption in therapy to study after-effects. Thereafter, all the study participants voluntarily submitted to six months of subsequent treatment which was based on the stimulation with the best results up to that point. The researchers checked the therapeutic success based on, amongst other things, the changes in the subjective tinnitus loudness and nuisance as well as the degree of tinnitus severity and through measurements of patients' brain waves on an EEG. With a treatment of four to six hours per day, after twelve weeks the perceived tinnitus volume had already decreased by 51 percent whereas the subjective nuisance dropped by 48 percent. These effects also continued to be measurable and statistically significant during the interruption in treatment although they did diminish. This indicates that longer treatment is necessary to achieve a maximum therapeutic effect. This was confirmed by the subsequent voluntary treatment: after it, the percentage of all study participants with the tinnitus severity level "mild" had more than doubled compared to the start of the study (from 32 to 69 percent), without the occurrence of long-term side effects. The sham treatment on the other hand did not result in any change in the patients' tinnitus. Moreover, the researchers were able to show that the neurostimulator actually resulted in brainwave changes. In this they see evidence of the fact that the stimulator brings pathologically synchronously firing neuron clusters back into a healthy rhythm.
