What is a Cure? Insight into ATA's Work and Misison

ATA PODCASTS: TRANSCRIPT

What is a Cure? Insight into ATA's Work and Mission

Title: What is a cure? Insight into ATA's work and mission
Description:ATA reviews some of its recent victories like establishment of the collaborative 2009 NIDCD tinnitus workshop, “Brain Stimulation for Treatment of Tinnitus,” and provides insight into its dedication toward pursuing a tinnitus cure.
Author: American Tinnitus Association
Length: 05:47
Size: 4.07 MB
 

Transcript

(Music intro)

Announcer: What exactly is a tinnitus cure? To answer that, let's first address what tinnitus is and what it isn't. Tinnitus isn't a disease, which is verifiable anatomical malfunction of some part of the body. Technically, tinnitus is a symptom of a malfunction but the human toll of tinnitus is sometimes so severe that it becomes neither disease nor symptom. Instead, tinnitus self defines as a life-altering condition separate and apart all unto itself.

Tinnitus was a tag along condition in the research community for many years. They reasoned, 'when we conduct research on deafness we will probably stumble onto something that will help tinnitus too'.

And there was some truth to that statement. In the 1980s, when ATA joined in petitioning for the founding of National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), we were successful. The NIDCD opened its doors in 1988 as the first U.S. governmental funding agency for hearing related research. Then we waited and lobbied some more before tinnitus became its own researchable entity. ATA was funding the small projects but big research had to wait. Finally, in the mid 1990s, a few ground breaking tinnitus studies were funded by the NIDCD. Tinnitus finally got its starring role.

In December 2005, the NIDCD held its first scientific workshop on tinnitus and only tinnitus. ATA sent a lot of star power to that meeting: Richard Salvi, Ph.D., as its chair, Michael Seidman, M.D., Rich Tyler, Ph.D., Carol Bauer, M.D. and Jim Kaltenbach, Ph.D., all from ATA's Scientific Advisory Committee. They were members of the workshop panel.

In 2008, we embarked on an effort to persuade the Department of Defense (DoD) to fund tinnitus research. For a 2nd consecutive year, we successfully convinced congress to list tinnitus as a researchable condition under the DoD's Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program, often known as the PMRP, which has a research pool of $50 million. It is only because of ATA's message of urgency that tinnitus became an eligible condition under this $50 million umbrella. However, our efforts to increase awareness and available funding stretch far beyond encouraging the DoD. They also engage the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In 2009, we were particularly thrilled to see these three agencies come together for a collaborative conference on tinnitus titled "Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Tinnitus". The NIDCD hosted the conference on the NIH campus. Attended by ATA, it included representatives from NIH, other health agencies, the DoD, the VA and key tinnitus researchers from academia and the private sector.

This groundbreaking conference, devoted entirely to tinnitus research, was the direct result of legislative report language that ATA crafted in support of cross agency research collaboration.  The brilliant and daring goals outlined there, mirrored in ATA's Roadmap to a Cure, will lead breakthroughs in treatments and relief.

So the question remains, is treatment a cure? It depends on who you ask and sometimes on the treatment you ask about.

A patient, who tinnitus blissfully goes away completely whenever he wears his much needed hearing aid, states unequivocally that his tinnitus is cured. Another patient convincingly argues that a cure can only mean a treatment such as surgical procedure, device, drug, or other therapy, that when completed completes a permanent absence of tinnitus without needing a device or drug to sustain the silence.

Some people argue that funding therapy based research is not money well spent. They fear it diverts money away from basic research, the real kind, in the lab, under the microscope where they're convinced the cure surely lies. But the story is bigger than that. Treatment focused research contributes a lion's share of data to the basic researcher's pool of knowledge, sometimes even pinning down a place to start.

For example, after a few patients reported that the anticonvulsant drug Neurontin quieted their tinnitus, a team of clinicians began testing the drug to see if the treatment was feasible. Soon after, a basic research team began examining the areas of the brain that responded to the drug to get to the root of the condition. Here, as in many cases, a study for a treatment inspired basic researchers to dig deeper for a cause.

We are left with this simple marvelous fact: All paths to a cure are the right ones. Whether studies are basic, clinical, animal or human, whether they are looking at molecules or looking at maskers, all of them in the world of tinnitus are pointing the way home.

(Music outro)