Effectiveness of sound enrichment and counseling in the treatment of tinnitus

Abstract

Various management methods have been proposed for individuals with clinically significant tinnitus. Among these several methods for tinnitus management a few have gained wide acceptance and generally regarded as a viable management option. Two of these methods, Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) and Tinnitus Masking (TM) are similar in that they both employ sound therapy although they have different rationales and use different protocols for the pU1pose. But each of these methods has certain limitations making it difficult to apply in the Indian scenario. In order to overcome these limitations more practical and cost-effective method that will combine certain features of both the methods have been proposed and factors affecting its efficacy have been discussed. Two proposed methods are, one in which the participants were administered management through periodic visit labeled as Group I and second is through correspondence labeled Group II. Reduction in severity was more for those in Group I than for Group II. Second observation made was that maximum improvement was seen in participants with severe tinnitus than those with less severe tinnitus. Third, there was no statistically significant difference between the groups and within the groups with different duration of tinnitus. Fourth, there was a moderate correlation between moderate sensorineural hearing loss and amount of improvement with proposed methods. Finally, it was observed that there was a strong correlation between the baseline scores and rate of improvement in first, second and third month for both the groups.