Unification of Treatments and Interventions for Tinnitus Patients - UNITI

A Special Issue on "The Journey of Hearing and Hearing-Related Disorders over Time" is now available here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jcm/special_issues/B57567CJJO. 

Hearing is a critical sense, which is a prerequisite for interpersonal communication, perception of the environment, and social interaction. However, hearing competence is not a stable capability but changes over time due to various reasons such as aging, acquired diseases, infections, environmental influences, and more.

This special issue welcomes original research articles and systematic reviews on the development of hearing or hearing-related disorders (e. g. tinnitus or hyperacusis) over time, the impact of an interaction between hearing loss and hearing-related disorders on the progress, the influence of potential treatments and methods to evaluate progression of hearing loss over time.

The 2nd UNITI Hackathon tool place in Granada, Spain between 7-9 February 2023 and it was a great success. Partners of UNITI consortium split into two main groups. The Writing group that focused on writing two manuscripts, one for the main UNITI results from the RCTs and one for the socio-economic study. The Data analysis group focused on analysing all UNITI data available. A significan amount of data is available and in the next months the consortium will work towards analysing this data. Several publications are expected towards this direction. Furthermore, the consortium is also investigating ways of exploiting the data and releasing it as open in order for the tinnitus research community to continue working on this data.

We are pleased to announce the first two UNITI publications in 2023: Since Thursday, Jan 19, PLOS Digital Health published the article of Milena Engelke et al. Pilot study of a smartphone-based tinnitus therapy using structured counseling and sound therapy: A multiple-baseline design with ecological momentary assessment.

In addition,The Statistical Analysis Plan for the Unification of Treatments and Interventions for Tinnitus Patients Randomized Clinical Trial (UNITI-RCT) is now available online as a pre-print.

 
The database of the UNITI RCT has been closed yesterday and the data analysis of the main UNITI hypotheses starts today, Dec 20. The statistical analysis plan is available here 

For detailed information about the study please have a look at the published study protocol at Trials 2021, Dec4;22(1):875