There are various sources of tinnitus and the generation of the tinnitus is not at all obvious except in the two cases of objective tinnitus, muscular and vascular in origin. I’d like to offer you today an attempt to explain one particular kind of tinnitus. The tinnitus I’m talking about is the one which we usually see associated with an auditory sensitivity loss and with a threshold shift. We find this typically after sound exposure, either TTS or PTS, during the attacks of fluctuant hearing loss, and in the early stages of antibiotic intoxication.

Up until fairly recently, that is maybe 10-15 years ago, our only concern was whether hair cells were present or absent. And then, of course, it was clear that absent hair cells cannot function. There was one early exception and that was the demonstration by Wuestenfeld and Spranger and by Beck and Micheler in Germany, of so-called swollen nuclei.