Monitoring of Auditory Discrimination Therapy for Tinnitus Treatment Based on Event-Related (De-) Synchronization Maps

Tinnitus is an auditory condition that causes humans to hear a sound at any time anywhere. Chronic and refractory tinnitus is caused by the synchronization of neurons, and a treatment alternative has been created on the basis of the re-synchronization of neural activity by means of sound. To date, several acoustic therapies have been proposed to treat tinnitus. However, the effect is not well understood yet. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of auditory discrimination therapy (ADT) by monitoring the level of neural synchronization before and after the ADT-based treatment. To this end, we mapped and analyzed the neural (de-) synchronization response of 11 tinnitus patients in two experimental conditions: (1) auditory material encoding and (2) auditory material retrieval. The results suggest that event-related (de-) synchronization (ERD/ERS) maps could indicate ADT reduces attention towards tinnitus if we consider incremental alpha-ERS responses elicited after the acoustic therapy during auditory encoding tasks. Furthermore, there were statistical changes in at least one of the brain frequency bands in each subject, which could indicate a decrease in attention headed for tinnitus or towards everyday acoustic environments.