Neurofeedback for Tinnitus Treatment – Review and Current Concepts

An effective treatment to completely alleviate chronic tinnitus symptoms has not yet been discovered. However, recent developments suggest that neurofeedback (NFB), a method already popular in the treatment of other psychological and neurological disorders, may provide a suitable alternative. NFB is a non-invasive method generally based on electrophysiological recordings and visualizing of certain aspects of brain activity as positive or negative feedback that enables patients to voluntarily control their brain activity and thus triggers them to unlearn typical neural activity patterns related to tinnitus. The purpose of this review is to summarize and discuss previous findings of neurofeedback treatment studies in the field of chronic tinnitus. In doing so, also an overview about the underlying theories of tinnitus emergence is presented and results of resting-state EEG and MEG studies summarized and critically discussed. To date, neurofeedback as well as electrophysiological tinnitus studies lack general guidelines that are crucial to produce more comparable and consistent results. Even though neurofeedback has already shown promising results for chronic tinnitus treatment, further research is needed in order to develop more sophisticated protocols that are able to tackle the individual needs of tinnitus patients more specifically.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2017-12-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fnagi.2017.00386PMID 29249959PMCID 5717031
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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