Quality of Tinnitus

Chae, Sa Yong

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Evaluation of the quality of tinnitus is very useful for understanding of the nature of tinnitus by non-sufferers including physicians. But tinntus matching with pure tone is a limited access to qualify tinnitus and frequently it is difficult for sufferer to match and this may be an important cause of low test-retest reliability.
OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study are to identify sounds mimicking tinnitus using generated and environmental sounds and its reliability on repeated tests.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
34 patients(M: 22, F: 12) who have suffered from continuous tinnitus were selected. Electronically generated sounds were pure tone, narrow band(1/3 octave band width) noise filtered from gaussian noise, random frequency band sine waves with center frequency. Twenty artificial and fourteen natural environmental sounds were recorded and calibrated. The most similar sound were selected by sufferer three times at the minimum time interval 2 weeks. The frequency spectrums of environmental sounds were analyzed.
RESULTS
The most similar sounds mimicking tinnitus were pure tone(29.2%), frequency modulated sine wave(27.1%), natural environmental sounds(20.8%), narrow bane noise(14.6%), artificial environmental sounds(12.5%) in order. The reliability of the selection of the most similar sounds on repeated tests were very high(94.1%). The spectrum of the environmental sounds selected were broad.
CONCLUSIONS
The quality of tinitus can be evaluated more objectively by electronically generated sounds which are highly reproducible. The quality of tinnitus is quite consistent. Also in the majority, the quality of tinnitus is different from the quality of pure tone.