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Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

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Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#141

As one who is undergoing mapping of Cochlear Implant, I feel the need to put it out there some things about regrowing cilia hairs in cochlear. If you had been subjected to a life-threatening high body temperature (106.5+ F, spinal meningitis), your cochlears would make for a poor candidate in benefitting from most form of treatment of cilia hair regrowth. The problem is the fibrocyte nerve pathways (the ones embedded…

I lost one of my ears in a high fever episode when i was a child. I guess what you wrote means i shouldn't get my hopes up for these kind of treatments :(

The treatment is focused on regrowth of cilia hairs; what we, the high-temped folks, are really waiting for is a cochlear transplant or a regrowth of fibrocyte pathways within the cochlear wall (as well as this treatment).

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#142
post #136

The article says the treatment focuses on increased speech intelligibility. Speech, depending on how you define it, can occupy a fairly narrow range of the audio spectrum that humans can perceive. My hearing loss is mostly on the high end (10-12K and above) and impedes my ability to hear speech in noisy environments. More troubling has been the inability to enjoy music/sound in those upper ranges, resulting in the mu…

This reminds me of one aspect of my hearing loss that's been hard to explain. Amplification doesn't fix everything. My hearing loss is complex, a mix of conduction problems in the middle ear and something neurological as well. I can hear very high and very low frequencies surprisingly well. There's a big bite out of the main speech band, though. I find that speech, with background noise, that goes through a mediocre…

The other thing you miss with hearing aids, and even headphones, are the low frequencies picked up more by the body than the ears. Sunn O))), for example. I’d rather listen raw, too, but I raise the level somewhat, which can bother others.

What I probably need is a DAC for my sound system. The music streaming services like Apple don’t provide an adequate way to equalize the audio and balance to compensate for my hearing loss.

Edit: I keep hoping that Apple will do a better job here with their next release of AirPods Pro. One of the problems with Apple Music is they set the max volume too low. I can sort of understand the desire to help people protect their hearing, but their max level is less than IRL, and there is no way to bypass that setting.

Tidal is better. And there are plenty of YouTube channels I listen to at half volume, so it’s not the Apple hardware causing the problem.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#143

I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).

It’s funny to me seeing everyone in this thread acting like tinnitus is the worst shit ever and they’re suffering everyday. Look up Meniere’s disease. It can be so much worse. And yes, I understand that suffering is relative and that there are worse things than Meniere’s disease, thank you.

It's not a race. I have conditions that are considered worst than tinnitus.

Having a lawnmower in my head at all time is not the end of the world. But it's certainly exhausting and sometimes disabilitating.

It's meaningless to compare health conditions. What's the worst between something that kills you, something that paralyzes you, something that gives you constant pain and something that triggers constant fear in you?

All of them. All of them are the worst to people who suffers from them.

Tinnitus is brought up in the article, this is why people are talking about it. Not because it's a condition that is worst than others.

Reading about a possible cure is one of the are form of hope someone with tinnitus will ever have.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#144

The article says the treatment focuses on increased speech intelligibility. Speech, depending on how you define it, can occupy a fairly narrow range of the audio spectrum that humans can perceive. My hearing loss is mostly on the high end (10-12K and above) and impedes my ability to hear speech in noisy environments. More troubling has been the inability to enjoy music/sound in those upper ranges, resulting in the mu…

Check out Crescendo ( http://refined-audiometrics.com/wordpress1/ ) -- an engineer/musician with a hearing loss similar to yours has developed a piece of software that's like a "super" hearing aid (non-linear compression per Bark band) that helps to bring the sparkle back for music.

Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#145
post #138

I have been seeing a lot of news articles from university websites on HN recently. Do people realize that they essentially function as hype-generation outlets and are not intended to provide an objective and unbiased assessment of the research?

I think most here are interested in hearing about what cool new research is being performed at the top universities regardless if the article itself includes the conclusions of the studies + peer review.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Crescendo ( http://refined-audiometrics.com/wordpress1/ ) -- an engineer/musician with a hearing loss similar to yours has developed a piece of software that's like a "super" hearing aid (non-linear compression per Bark band) that helps to bring the sparkle back for music.

Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!

I think you need to email David McClain to buy a compiled version, but the source (not including the plugin wrappers, etc.) is here: https://github.com/dbmcclain/Crescendo-Hearing-Correction

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#147

I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).

But you can certainly learn to ignore it. After one particularly loud concert, my ears started to ring, and they have never really stopped. I was depressed, disappointed, and angry with myself for not having taken better care of my ears. But you know what? After 6 months to a year, I habituated to it. I notice the ringing on a super quiet morning in the countryside when there aren't any other sounds, but other than t…

While you can habituate to it and will after several years, it's still a ghastly condition that can come back and negatively impact you. Personally, I have it since birth and have never experienced silence. Most of the time, I cannot hear it but it's always there lurking behind a thin veil of distractions.

I recently caught the covid virus. The symptoms were bad but far from what annoyed me the most from it. The worst is how since I have had it, my tinnitus is back to the forefront of my life and louder than ever. Many people who have managed to ignore their tinnitus will have it come back when they are exhausted, tired, sick, stressed, etc.

Being dismissive and saying you can learn to ignore it is not really helpful, this is true of most conditions. This article however offers a tangible cure.

Not to be dismissive either but the ringing from hearing music that is too loud is the mildest case most commone case of tinnitus that exists and will often simply reduce by a large margin on its own. Chronic tinnitus is defined as a tinnitus that lasts more than six months.

In my case, it's at the level of a lawnmower behind a thin wall when at it's worst and mosquito near the ear when at it's mildest. In some other cases, it's car engine and even jet engine level. To me your message (while probably not on purpose) comes across like someone with an amputated finger talking to someone with two amputated legs about how you can learn to live with it (especially with the talk about selection bias, which is useful when looking at trends but not when talking to individuals). Yes you can control it and yes it's the same medical condition. But it's not the same beast.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#148

I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).

Can people please stop posting this in every tinnitus thread? It’s an actual trigger that makes tinnitus worse for others. There’s nothing useful brought upon by falsely correlating suicidal and tinnitus, and in fact it creates some major negative externalities by making folks have massive tinnitus flare ups or even trigger suicidal ideation.

Tinnitus is mentionned in the first paragraph of the article. Talking about the suicide rate is usually a simple way to get people who know nothing of the condition to understand how serious it is, most people imagine the faint temporary noise that happens after listening to a loud movie but it's much more worst than that.

I grant you, some people who use "trigger warnings" would have added one before talking about suicide rates. I however do not use them outside mental health forums and such.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#149
post #43

I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).

9% of women with tinnitus attempt suicide, or 9% of women that attempt suicide have tinnitus? I find it curious since I've had tinnitus since I was very young and it isn't life wrecking - but maybe that's because it is just part of my default life experience.

"Suicide attempts happened with 9% of women with severe tinnitus."

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played around with an equalizer (hardware or software, doesn't matter) that offers rather extreme adjustments like +15dB or more, to see if you can approximate a flat source+ear system? Or is your loss more like a brickwall filter than a 12dB/octave slope for example? I'm an audio engineer, not an audiologist, so I'm just shooting from the hip here as it's something I've been curious about in case I develop…

Please don't do this. This would work for a conductive hearing loss (ear drum or bones in your ear messed up, etc.) but not for a sensorineural hearing loss (like what you get from aging or from noise exposure). You need non-linear compression to compensate for loudness recruitment. At a basic level, when you have sensorineural hearing loss, soft sounds will sound way softer than they should (or be below the threshol…

Quite right! I’m quite “deaf” in the sense that I can’t understand what people are saying - they sound muffled (and I can’t separate two people talking at once anymore).

But, I’m actually quite sensitive to loud noises!

What I need is equalization and compression, so I can hear the soft noises. I don’t need much, if any, overall gain.

Why can’t Apple provide that, they have all the necessary technology at hand?

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