ABSTRACT
More so than hearing loss, tinnitus strongly interferes with the daily lives of millions of people. In industrialised nations, 8% to 20% of the adult population currently experience tinnitus. Unfortunately, few treatments are effective. As tinnitus is the subjective perception of sound in the absence of an external stimulus, animal models are difficult to establish. One possibility for studying tinnitus in animals consists of recording the electrophysiological activity of the neural structures of the auditory pathway. This approach has demonstrated that high doses of salicylate, the active component of aspirin known to induce
tinnitus in humans (1), provoked an increase in the spontaneous activity of the cochlear nerve fibres (2-4) and modified the average spectrum of activity recorded from the round window, which is a gross measure of the spontaneous activity of the cochlear nerve (5-7). The characteristics of these changes appear to be similar to those of salicylate-induced tinnitus in animals (5). This suggests that, at least in part, salicylateinduced tinnitus is associated with dysfunction of the cochlear nerve. Nevertheless, the demonstration that abnormal activity at the periphery is responsible for the occurrence of tinnitus requires studies of perception.
