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00:00:01
Speaker 1: Nine minutes past nine. If you suffer tinatus, this is something you should listen to. No pun intended, but it's tinatous Awareness Week and your brain could filter out tinatus, you could get your life back. How will that work? Well, let's find out. Doctor Matthew Rekenya is on the line. It's a researcher in tinatus. Doctor. Good evening, Thanks for your time.
00:00:29
Speaker 2: Hi Matthew, thanks for having me.
00:00:30
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about the research you're doing.
00:00:33
Speaker 2: So basically, tinatus is a very complex condition which can come from different sources, different factors. It's something that can come from age related hearing us, sometimes injury or infection. So it's quite a complicated problem and there is still no cure. We can't get rid of it. So the best we can do today is really try and understand it better. And the second thing we can try to do is how to treat it or how to manage it and what are the best techniques to do that. What has been going on and there's a lot of research around Australia and around the world that tries to find those techniques and what are the techniques that are the most effective at managing tinatis and we're trying this week to give a voice to that research and put it in the foreground and get people to try it and understand what it does and how it can work for them.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: All Right, we'll talk about that in a sec but firstly, tentatives itself. What is it? I mean, I've heard it described from people who have it as just ringing in the ears. Is that what it is?
00:01:36
Speaker 2: So the actual official definition of tinatus is the perception of a sound in the absence of an external stimulus, meaning there is no sounds around you, but your brain is perceiving or is hearing a sound. And that can be something that people put in the background naturally, or it can become something very intrusive and bothersome for some is a very broad term which can take different different shape and different impact on different people.
00:02:07
Speaker 1: Okay, why does the brain do that?
00:02:10
Speaker 2: So it's it's not fully understood. Sometimes it's to compensate for some kind of damage on the hearing pathways. So when it's in the case of hearing loss or trauma, there might be some damage in the peripheral parts of the hearing pathways of the brain and your brain is basically lost some signal that is trying to compensate for and creates the sounds. In other cases, it could be linked to stress or anxiety, something that actually triggers your limbic system to respond and like creates some kind of of sounds. So there's different different reasons for it.
00:02:53
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, now you mentioned strategy, So how do we convince the brain what it's hearing, if you like, or imagining, is not real? How do we do that?
00:03:05
Speaker 2: So the way to explain it, the simplest way to explain is that tinatus itself is not a threat. So once you've got all the hearing checked, So if you had your hearing tested, you had your ears looked into by your GP or a geologist or an e n T and you're sure there is no infection or there is no you know, something that could be solved surgically by an e n T, then from that point on, the sound is present, but it's not a threat. It's not something that you need to pay attention to. Because the reason why tinatis becomes something bothersome or something intrusive is because you pay too much attention to it. Basically, you enter a state of hyper vigilance where you're listening to the fire alarm, but there is no more fire. And what happens in that case is that the brand just goes to this repetitive loop and tries to really check, keeps checking on the sound and tries to understand why it's there and what it represents. What we try to do is use techniques to distract your brain and trick or teach your brain to not listen to the sound and understand that it's not something that you should be paying attention to as much. And if you compare that to something else that happens in the everyday life, like the fridge in your kitchen or the ac in your living room, these are all found that we assimilate as being non threatening and that we immediately put in the background. We habituates to them, were able to basically zoom out of them or put them in the background, filter them out of our life. Yeah.
00:04:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you've got to do that with this as well. It must be harder to do, though.
00:04:46
Speaker 2: It's very easy to say and how to do, and it takes time, and not everything is going to work for everyone. I think there are four very important factors that I like to talk about. The first one is obviously reassurance that I just said about it's not something that is life threatening, is not something that is going to cause more issues than intrusiveness. Is very important. That reassurance is also going to help you basically convince your brain that you should let go of the sound. The second aspect is probably sound using sounds and some therapy to distract yourself. So a lot of people have correlation with hearing loss as well. So when you have hearing loss, using hearing aids or some sort of device to help you can also be considered to be some stimulation or some therapy because you're basically distracting your brain with natural sounds that are in your environment. But you can also use nature sounds or noises. Some people use noises at night to fall asleep, or the radio in the background to try and distract their brain from listening to the sound constant. So that's very effective. And then the third technique that has been shown to work really well is cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive behavior therapy informs interventions which are basically trying to look at your emotions and your thoughts, and by doing that, we again trying to change our behavior and change the way we look at it to try and let go. Because of that hypervisionance, we
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tend to be very negative and very obsessed by the term, so we try to break that down and make it a bit more acceptable and a bit more acknowledged. And the last one is obviously relaxation in my mindfulness. I mentioned earlier that ginitis is often linked to stress and anxiety. Our stress response in the body physiologically create hormones like cortisal adrenaline, which are gonna create a response in your body that is going to make the tinities sound louder. So by using breathing and relaxation, we're basically able to stimulate our vagus nerves, which in turn helps us relax and make that response less importance and at the same time reduce the loudness of the tints. All those combined are very effective, and people can pick and choose which ones they want to try and put put in their lifestyle.
00:07:13
Speaker 1: All right, I imagine there'd be a lot of quack cures floating around the Internet, particularly where people might google, you know, a solution for internet for sorry, solution for tinatus and come up with, you know, some crazy things like pouring hot oil in your ears or something I don't know that is correct.
00:07:33
Speaker 2: That is correct. There's a lot of things. There's everything and anything, and you can hear of sprays, drops, pills, devices, vibrations, things that acupuncture sometimes is also brought up. All those things will have some kind of benefit to some extent for people. Sometimes it's a placebo effect. Sometimes it might have a relaxation effect, and sometimes it actually might be helping something else that is stressing you up and ends up having an impact on your tenatis. But the evidence when it comes to tinetis itself is really centered around us. For techniques I mentioned earlier information about the condition, some therapy, tibet and relaxation in those combined can help and in some cases now we're seeing more and more, you know, research being done in other ways of stimulating the ears and the brain to help basically reduce the loudness of the tinatus. And that's what came out in December in the UK, someone using sounds and some therapy to try and stimulate the brain and new way to desynchronize some of the neurons and try to help the tinetist loudness go down.
00:08:50
Speaker 1: Sure, all right, have we seen a rise in over the last I don't know, decade all two, I imagine. I'm trying to think of causes and people wearing headphones particularly over the last what ten twenty years, although I suppose we had them around before, you know, loud loud workplaces, loud conscerts. This is nothing new, I suppose in terms of damaging the hearing at least and resulting in tinatures, I.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: Think, I think absolutely right, there's a big, you know, prevalence that is increasing. I think it's sometimes related to hearing loss as well, So there is a big link between hearing loss and sinatis. But seventy percent of people with sinatis have some sort of hearing problems, not always considered hearing loss in terms of a specific audiogram or considered to be a problem, but they have hearing problems. And that means that the more you expose yourself to noises as well, the more you're going to be damaging your hearing systems, the more you're likely to develop tinities at some point in your life. That being fad doesn't mean that everyone is going to be bothered by the tinatis. Actually, the research shows that there is ten to fifteen percent of the population at some point in their life will experiment will experienced sinits is in a chronic or acute manner. So it could be that you go to a concert and you come out of it with your ears buzzing, or it could be something as I said before, maybe a trauma. Maybe you have a car accent whiplash that creates some irradiating pain in your neck and that creates tinnises. So there are different ways to develop it, but only two to three percent of those that have tinatis or experience did it will become bothered by it, and that's really where the attention is, because this is really the impact that it's having, and it's really where these people need a lot of help.
00:10:45
Speaker 1: And the first place would be go to the GP.
00:10:47
Speaker 2: Presumably, absolutely so a lot of people, I think it's about ninety four percent start online. So they start by looking for solutions online obviously, and then after that they end up obviously going to the GPS. Most of the time the problem there is a GP will really say if there is no hearing problems, there's nothing you can do. And that's really where I don't I like to say, maybe let's take a step back and reflect on what they're saying. It's they're not saying there's nothing you can do. They say there's nothing they can do about it for you. And you can do a lot of things to try and do that process of habituation and get better manage it yourself. And you need to find those ways for yourself.
00:11:32
Speaker 1: Jimmy has texted in she says hearing aid. She's found a hearing aid stops tenatus. Could that be the case?
00:11:39
Speaker 2: Absolutely? Absolutely so. If you have hearing loss, so that's mild to moderate hearing loss or even you know, profound hearing loss, sometimes because you've lost some of the signal that used to go to your brain, the brain has to compensate. It's like turning the volume up on the radio without the radio being im tune on any channels, right, you're going to have noise. Right, So your brain is doing essentially the same thing is up the bottom upping the game, and then something is happening and it's just making noise.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: Right.
00:12:10
Speaker 2: So when you have amplification with a hearing aid, you're basically restimulating this part of the hearing system that last its signal and the brain is now receiving the signal on the channels that didn't have anything for a while. And it doesn't have to put the volume as much as up as you used to do, so it puts the volume of the tins down.
00:12:32
Speaker 1: How about that? All right? Fascinating discussion. Dr Mitchell Reckon Ye, thank you so much for your time and for anybody with tinators start at the GP as you suggest. Thank you, thank you, have a good night. All right. That's Tinator's awareness week this week, so I thought we'd get him on a lot of people I know suffer tenatus and it you know, it is to a large degree age related potentially anyway, although interesting to hear, even a car accident could do it, and it could start a lot earlier. It's amazing the human body.