Neuropsychological monitoring of current acoustic therapies as alternative treatment of chronic tinnitus.

At present, the majority of the top tinnitus treatments is based on sound. Sound-based therapies may become highly effective when the right patient at the correct time and the appropriate context is selected. The investigation presented here attempts to compare sound therapies based on music, retraining, neuromodulation, and binaural sounds in line with (1) neuro-audiology assessments and (2) psychological evaluations. Sound-based therapies were applied in 76 volunteers with tinnitus for 60 days. The neuro-audiology assessment was based on the estimation of the approximate entropy of the electrical neural activity. This assessment revealed that the whole frequency structure of the neural networks showed a higher level of activeness in tinnitus sufferers than in control individuals. Then psychological evaluation showed that retraining treatment tended to be the most effective sound-based therapy to reduce tinnitus perception, but it may be not recommended for individuals with anxiety. Binaural sounds and neuromodulation produced very similar effects at reducing tinnitus perception, stress and anxiety. Music treatments can be applied with caution since they may worsen the condition due to their frequency content.