Abstract
About 20 percent of people above 60 years old suffer from tinnitus though no definitive treatment has been found for it. Evaluation of electrical brain activity using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) is one of the methods to investigate the underlying reasons of tinnitus perception. Previous studies using ERPs suggest that the precognitive memory in tinnitus groups is negatively affected in comparison to the normal hearing groups. In this study, cognitive memory has been assessed using visual and auditory P300 response with oddball paradigm. Fifteen chronic tinnitus subjects and six normal hearing subjects participated in the experiment. T-test with significance level of 0.05 was applied on amplitude and latency of auditory and visual P300 for all electroencephalography (EEG) channels separately to compare tinnitus and normal hearing groups where the tinnitus group showed meaningful lower amplitude of auditory P300 peak in three EEG channels.
Highlights
Tinnitus is an underlying condition that includes ringing, buzzing, whistling, or hissing in the ears in the absence of an external stimulus such as sound (Rewar, 2015)
To investigate if tinnitus group and normal hearing group have meaningful difference, each channel was compared between groups separately using a Two-Sample Assuming Unequal Variances T-test with significance level of 0.05
Results showed that no channel had significant difference in P300 latency and three channels (FT7 (p < 0.045), FT8 (p < 0.025) and T7 (p < 0.01)) in auditory P300 peak had notable difference between tinnitus and normal hearing group
Summary
Tinnitus is an underlying condition that includes ringing, buzzing, whistling, or hissing in the ears in the absence of an external stimulus such as sound (Rewar, 2015). In the US, it is estimated that about 25.3% of adults have some form of tinnitus (Shargorodsky et al, 2010), and about 5–10 percent of adults have chronic tinnitus (Henry et al, 2015). The impact of tinnitus can be extremely disturbing and debilitating, markedly impairing mood, concentration, functioning and overall quality of life in approximately 1–3 percent of the adult population (Adrian and El Refaie, 2000). The relatively high prevalence of tinnitus in the population makes it a common problem that can be classified broadly into two main types: objective and subjective. Subjective tinnitus is the most frequently occurring type of tinnitus and results from exposure to loud noise, anticholinergic effects of some medications, increased age, or, more commonly, it has no identifiable cause aside from hearing loss, which is often comorbid (Lockwood et al, 2002)
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