Tinnitus diagnosis and therapy in the aged.

We report on a study of tinnitus in more than 400 patients 20 to 80 years old who had suffered from tinnitus for more than one year. Quality of tinnitus, localization, frequency range, severity, masking and residual inhibition effects show no age dependence. The possible causes of tinnitus, is onset and duration and factors that increase or reduce tinnitus also show no age dependence. Regarding the grade of annoyance judged from a subjective scaling, younger patients seen to suffer more from tinnitus than do older subjects, who seem to compensate their tinnitus more often. With regard to the different therapeutic methods used in this study (transtympanal electrostimulation, iontophoresis, biofeedback, tinnitus masker, hearing aid), the stable benefit over more than one year experienced by those patients fitted with a hearing aid was encouraging for young and old subjects. In both groups, about 3% of the patients could be successfully equipped with a tinnitus masker. Independent of age, the improvement by the other methods is less than 1%. Our results show that sufficient prognostic data on the efficiency of a therapeutic method cannot be perceived from the different tinnitus measurements for either the young or the old subjects.