Summary: Researchers reveal the precuneus is more connected to the dorsal attention network and less connected to the default mode network in people with chronic tinnitus.
Source: University of Illinois.
Tinnitus, a chronic ringing or buzzing in the ears, has eluded medical treatment and scientific understanding. A new study by University of Illinois researchers found that chronic tinnitus is associated with changes in certain networks in the brain, and furthermore, those changes cause the brain to stay more at attention and less at rest.
The finding provides patients with validation of their experiences and hope for future treatment options.
“Tinnitus is invisible. It cannot be measured by any device we have, the way we can measure diabetes or hypertension,” said study leader Fatima Husain, a professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Illinois. “So you can have this constant sound in your head, but nobody else can hear it and they may not believe you. They may think it’s all in your imagination. Medically, we can only manage some symptoms, not cure it, because we don’t understand what’s causing it.”
One factor that has complicated tinnitus research is the variability in the patient population. There are a lot of variables — for example, duration, cause, severity, concurrent hearing loss, age, type of sound, which ear and more — which have led to inconsistent study results.
“We have been so swamped by variability that finding anything that is consistent, that gives us one objective metric for tinnitus, is very exciting,” said Husain, who also is affiliated with the neuroscience program and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.
Using functional MRI to look for patterns across brain function and structure, the new study found that tinnitus is, in fact, in the hearers’ heads — in a region of the brain called the precuneus, to be precise.
The precuneus is connected to two inversely related networks in the brain: the dorsal attention network, which is active when something holds a person’s attention; and the default mode network, which are the “background” functions of the brain when the person is at rest and not thinking of anything in particular.
“When the default mode network is on, the dorsal attention network is off, and vice versa. We found that the precuneus in tinnitus patients seems to be playing a role in that relationship,” said Sara Schmidt, a graduate student in the neuroscience program and the first author of the paper.
The researchers found that, in patients with chronic tinnitus, the precuneus is more connected to the dorsal attention network and less connected to the default mode network. Additionally, as severity of the tinnitus increased, so did the observed effects on the neural networks. The results were published in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical.
“For patients, this is validating. Here is something related to tinnitus which is objective and invariant,” Husain said. “It also implies that tinnitus patients are not truly at rest, even when resting. This could explain why many report being tired more often. Additionally, their attention may be engaged more with their tinnitus than necessary, and that may lessen their attention to other things. If you have bothersome tinnitus, this may be why you have concentration issues.”
However, patients with recent-onset tinnitus did not show the differences in precuneus connectivity. Their scans looked more like the control groups, which begs the question of when and how changes in brain connectivity begin and whether they can be prevented or lessened.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen to the recent-onset patients later, so the next step is to do a longitudinal study to follow people after developing tinnitus and see if we can spot when these types of changes with the precuneus start to happen,” Schmidt said.
The researchers hope their findings generate new paths for future research, providing one invariant metric to look for and guidelines for patient groupings.
“Knowing that duration and severity are factors is important, and can help guide future study design. We can look at subgroups and see differences,” Schmidt said.
Husain’s group currently is conducting a study to look at tinnitus across military and civilian populations. More information, including how to participate, is available at here.
Funding: Tinnitus Research Consortium, American Tinnitus Association funded this study.
Source: Liz Ahlberg Touchstone – University of Illinois
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for “Connectivity of precuneus to the default mode and dorsal attention networks: A possible invariant marker of long-term tinnitus” by Sara A.Schmidt, JakeCarpenter-Thompson, and Fatima T.Husain in NeuroImage: Clinical. Published online July 22 2017 doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2017.07.015
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]University of Illinois “Ringing in Ears Keeps Brain More at Attention and Less at Rest.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 25 August 2017.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/tinnitus-attention-7378/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]University of Illinois (2017, August 25). Ringing in Ears Keeps Brain More at Attention and Less at Rest. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved August 25, 2017 from https://neurosciencenews.com/tinnitus-attention-7378/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]University of Illinois “Ringing in Ears Keeps Brain More at Attention and Less at Rest.” https://neurosciencenews.com/tinnitus-attention-7378/ (accessed August 25, 2017).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
Connectivity of precuneus to the default mode and dorsal attention networks: A possible invariant marker of long-term tinnitus
Resting state functional connectivity studies of tinnitus have provided inconsistent evidence concerning its neural bases. This may be due to differences in the methodology used, but it is also likely related to the heterogeneity of the tinnitus population. In this study, our goal was to identify resting state functional connectivity alterations that consistently appear across tinnitus subgroups. We examined two sources of variability in the subgroups: tinnitus severity and the length of time a person has had chronic tinnitus (referred to as tinnitus duration). Data for the current large-scale analysis of variance originated partly from our earlier investigations (Schmidt et al., 2013; Carpenter-Thompson et al., 2015) and partly from previously unpublished studies. Decreased correlations between seed regions in the default mode network and the precuneus were consistent across individuals with long-term tinnitus (who have had tinnitus for greater than one year), with more bothersome tinnitus demonstrating stronger decreases. In the dorsal attention network, patients with moderately severe tinnitus showed increased correlations between seeds in the network and the precuneus, with this effect also present in only some patients with mild tinnitus. The same effects were not seen in patients with mild tinnitus and tinnitus duration between 6 and 12 months. Our results are promising initial steps towards identifying invariant neural correlates of tinnitus and indexing differences between subgroups.
“Connectivity of precuneus to the default mode and dorsal attention networks: A possible invariant marker of long-term tinnitus” by Sara A.Schmidt, JakeCarpenter-Thompson, and Fatima T.Husain in NeuroImage: Clinical. Published online July 22 2017 doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2017.07.015
