Dysfunctional long term habituation to exogeneous tinnitus-matched sounds in patients with high tinnitus distress.

During the last years, the demand of accurate diagnostic tools for individualized tinnitus treatment gradually increased. Today several different psychometric instruments for the estimation of the patients degree of decompensation with clinical relevance have emerged. All of these tools are questionnaires for a subjective self-assessment and have deficits in comparability due to severe differences in their factor structure in the anamnesis. Those questionnaires thus they are only of limited value in the design of an individualized therapeutic approach. Objective diagnostic tools for the categorization of the patients' distress level are lacking in clinical routine. Scientific approaches yet demonstrated the feasibility of individual distress assessment by objective markers in the EEG. In this article we present the preliminary results of our study of a use of habituation correlates as objective indicator for the decompensation degree in high-distress tinnitus patients.