LAUSR

Approximately 12% of adults experience tinnitus, but about 1% experience severe tinnitus that is in some cases disabling. Tinnitus is often accompanied by hyperacusis, a debilitating condition in which moderate-intensity sounds are perceived as extremely loud. To date, a lot of evidence has supported that tinnitus and hyperacusis is a problem of the central nervous system that is caused or triggered by peripheral hearing loss (HL). Recent neuroimaging studies, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging (including diffusion tensor/spectrum imaging, DTI/DSI), resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), arterial spin labeling (ASL), and quantitative electroencephalography (EEG), have revealed significant structural and functional alterations of the brain associated with tinnitus and hyperacusis. From these studies, many key concepts linking tinnitus and/or hyperacusis to enhanced central gain, altered functional connectivity (FC) in neural networks, aberrant rhythmic activity in cortical networks, spontaneous hyperactivity, and aberrant activity in regions associated with anxiety, attention, emotion, and memory have emerged. In this Research Topic for Frontiers in Neuroscience, we bring together a collection of work from experts in the field that both summarizes past findings and introduces current advances to our understanding of non-pulsatile tinnitus and HL mechanisms using neuroimaging approaches. Hereinafter, we provide a summary of their contributions. The clinical and demographic data of the participants from all studies in the Research Topic are presented in Supplementary Table 1.