Objective Measures of Tinnitus: a Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND

The purpose of this review is to systematically appraise the English-language literature to identify methods of objectively diagnosing and measuring the severity of subjective idiopathic nonpulsatile tinnitus.

MATERIALS AND

METHODS

A systematic literature search was undertaken from the databases of MEDLINE (1946-May 2018), EMBASE (1980-May 2018), CINAHL (1981-May 2018), and BNI (1992-May 2018) according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

RESULTS

We identified 21 articles in this field. Reported objective tests include blood tests, electrophysiology measures, radiological measures, and balance tests. The overall quality of evidence was low, with most studies being low-powered.

DISCUSSION: Our review has not identified any reliable or reproducible objective measures of tinnitus. However, this piece of work has highlighted emerging areas where further high quality research may lead to the development of an effective method for objectively identifying and measuring the severity of tinnitus.