Original ArticleTranscranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of tinnitus: 4-year follow-up in treatment responders—a retrospective analysis
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Data from 235 patients (63 women and 172 men; age 51.2 ± 11.5 years) were analyzed retrospectively. Patients received rTMS either in the context of different clinical trials26, 27, 28, 29 or as compassionate use treatment between 2004 and January 2008. All patients were recruited from the Tinnituscenter at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and gave written informed consent. Study protocols were approved by the ethics committee of the University of Regensburg and conducted according to the
Results
Data of 235 patients with chronic tinnitus who completed 10 days of rTMS treatment were analyzed. No serious side effects were reported, neither with the temporal low-frequency stimulation protocol nor with the combined frontotemporal stimulation protocol. Some patients complained about irritations at the stimulation site and slight headaches during rTMS treatment.
For the entire study group. the repeated measure ANOVA revealed a highly significant change of the TQ score over time (F = 17.4; df
Discussion
Long-term follow-up assessments revealed that among those patients, who responded to rTMS treatment, most still experience an improvement in their tinnitus 2 and even almost 4 years after rTMS. We are well aware that our results have to be interpreted carefully because data are not derived from a controlled study but from clinical observations under naturalistic conditions. Analogous to other long-term follow-up studies35, 36 confounding factors such as a tendency to the mean, spontaneous
Acknowledgment
We thank Helene Niebling and Sandra Pfluegl for their technical assistance in administering rTMS and collecting data.
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2014, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Whether this difference is due to different connectivity measures used, or because of the differences between the spatial resolution of the source analysis technique used is still has to be resolved. Most (De Ridder et al., 2011e; De Ridder et al., 2005; Frank et al., 2011; Khedr et al., 2008; Kleinjung et al., 2007) but not all (Burger et al., 2011) neuromodulation studies have shown that chronic tinnitus is more difficult to suppress by TMS than tinnitus of recent onset. Only one study looked at the stimulation parameters in relation to the tinnitus duration (De Ridder et al., 2005).
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Parts of this study were funded by a grant from the Tinnitus Research Initiative (TRI).