Comparison of Different Therapeutic Effects of T-MIST for Chronic Idiopathic Tinnitus

OBJECTIVE: Tinnitus, as a common clinical symptom, has the characteristics of high incidence and great heterogeneity among different patients. As one of the common treatment strategies for tinnitus, this study is aimed at exploring the factors influencing tinnitus sound therapy and the correlation between different tinnitus acoustic characteristics. METHODS: 315 patients with chronic tinnitus were enrolled and divided into three groups according to the tinnitus multielement integration sound therapy (T-MIST): (1) vanishing, (2) remission, and (3) unchanged. The general characteristics, psychoacoustic scores (tinnitus handicap inventory (THI) and visual analog scale (VAS)), residual inhibition (RI), degree of hearing loss, and tinnitus characteristics of each group were compared. Finally, we analyze the predictive significance of different features for acoustic effects. RESULTS: The frequency of tinnitus in the vanishing group was higher than that in the remission and unchanged groups (P < 0.05). There were no differences in age, initial onset time, course of the disease, and VSAD between the vanishing group and the unchanged group (P > 0.05). High-frequency tinnitus may predict the vanishing of tinnitus after treatment (P < 0.05), but the degree of hearing loss, tinnitus characteristics (loudness and frequency), and psychoacoustic score (THI and VAS) were only weakly correlated (P < 0.05). Residual inhibition test (RI) was an independent risk factor for the efficacy of acoustic therapy (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: The patients were divided into three groups by T-MIST treatment effect; Kruskal-Wallis test and chi-square test were used to compare the baseline information of each group. Then, we analyzed the correlation between patient characteristics and psychoacoustic scores. Finally, logistic regression was performed to explore predictors that might influence the treatment effect. High-frequency tinnitus may have a better therapeutic effect; age, disease course, and other factors can not be stable explanation factors for a poor therapeutic effect of tinnitus. The residual inhibition (RI) test was an independent factor in predicting the efficacy of T-MIST.