The increasing use of explosive devices in combat zones is resulting in the rise of lingering hearing conditions in military personnel. As a result, the U.S. Department of Defense supporting a study at Washington University to determine if there are preexisting vulnerabilities in the brain’s networks that are associated with the development of tinnitus.
The increasing use of explosive devices in combat zones is resulting in the rise of lingering conditions in military personnel, including hearing loss, acoustic trauma and tinnitus. Because tinnitus is not always related to physical injury of the head or ear—there are a number of environmental, emotional and psychological triggers that can trigger tinnitus—the U.S. Department of Defense is supporting a study at Washington University to determine if there are preexisting vulnerabilities in the brain’s cortical neural networks that are associated with the development of tinnitus.
Jay Piccirillo, MD, professor of otolaryngology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and his study team will be using MRI scans to look for physiological precursors to the development of tinnitus in active-duty military personnel. They hope to identify differences in brain activity that will aid in the development of preventive strategies to alleviate the effects of tinnitus. Such findings could have far-reaching benefits for identifying those more at-risk of developing tinnitus.
“Through cognitive testing, we’ve known for many years that people with bothersome tinnitus have problems with concentration, memory, attention and other neurocognitive functions,” Piccirillo says. His research has found evidence that MRI scans of the brains of patients with tinnitus differ in important ways from the brain scans of persons without tinnitus. These include major differences in a variety of neural networks responsible for hearing, vision, sensation and short-term memory, among others.
“It really set the light bulb off for us to see that tinnitus isn’t just the perception of noise; it’s all of these cortical derangements,” Piccirillo says. “It’s almost as if the auditory center has hijacked other parts of the brain, causing it to focus too much on the noise.” The findings have led researchers to wonder if tinnitus patients’ brains behaved abnormally before they began to experience phantom noise that characterizes tinnitus.
To help answer that question, Piccirillo and his team will perform brain scans and cognitive tests on 200 soldiers before they are deployed to an active combat zone. The same 200 personnel will undergo the exact same tests within nine months of their return from deployment.
The study results could provide extremely useful data for potentially finding a cure for tinnitus.