Deactivation in Tinnitus Patients & Controls During a Tone Discrimination Task Studied with fMRI

Arthur Peter Wunderlich¹, Carlos Schnfeldt-Lecuona², Robert Christian Wolf², Wolfgang Freund¹

Tinnitus patients and healthy controls were studied by means of a tone discrimination task which consisted of tones with differing pitches presented above MR acoustic noise level with a sound-proven MR-compatible headphone. The main finding was deactivation of several cortical and subcortical regions during tone discrimination in healthy controls, while deactivation was not significant in the patient group. An interaction analysis revealed that caudate nucleus, posterior cingulate gyrus and right superior frontal gyrus showed significantly stronger deactivation during tone presentation in controls than in patients. These results are discussed in the light of recently published studies on task-related deactivation.