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Individually designed music therapy may help reduce the noise levels experienced by those who suffer from tinnitus, a common hearing disorder in industrialized countries [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online, Dec. 28, 2009].
Previous research has shown that such ringing is loud enough to cause a significant decline in the quality of life in 1-3 percent of the population. The cause of the condition remains unknown but the auditory cortex-the region of the brain that processes auditory information--is frequently distorted in individuals with tinnitus, with the amount of distortion related to the perceived loudness of ringing.
Christo Pantev, PhD, of the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignal Analysis at the University of Muenster in Germany, and colleagues developed a treatment strategy aimed at decreasing the loudness of the ringing by removing the musical notes that correspond with a patient's hearing loss.
The authors designed musical treatments adapted to the musical tastes of the patients and then stripped out the audio frequencies that matched the individual's tinnitus frequency. After one year of listening to these "notched" musical therapies, test subjects reported a distinct decrease in the loudness of ringing compared to tinnitus patients who had listened to analogous placebo music.
The authors suggest that the therapy is inexpensive and enjoyable and could be used to improve the function of patients with a distorted auditory cortex.
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