The BTA propose that a Biobank specific to tinnitus research would be a good use of the NHS's money.
Apparently £4m would be required to set it up.
Today, Artificial Intelligence is being used for all sorts of diverse areas of everyday life - for example, merely because I'm interested in photography, AI can auto-generate imagery based on a few human "inputs".
A consensus estimate of tinnitus sufferers is 8% - 12% - that's about
six hundred and twenty million, two hundred and forty thousand people World wide (the low estimate).
Would it not be possible for AI to trawl case notes of those tinnitus sufferers to postulate whether any treatment for *any* disorder has any positive (or negative) impact on tinnitus. As opposed to placebo effects.
Man spent £8,972,050,000 creating the James Webb Telescope to attempt to explain events happening in 4,21000 cubic light years of space.
But to what avail?
Perhaps to understand whether we are not alone or a indeed a simulation. Either way - not very helpful to humanity.
And yet we baulk at spending £4m (or 0.044% of the JWT budget) to the betterment of humans.
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Monty969
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I completely disagree that money spent on Space exploration, including the James Webb telescope, is not helpful to humanity. Not only is it our natural inclination to explore our environment, including Space, the technology that is developed for this purpose can have spin-off applications here on Earth. You're talking about using AI here, but there must be a lot of AI development put into Space exploration, such as planetary rovers. Plus we need to explore Space for our own future survival - there will come a time when we can longer live on this Earth and in order to maintain the species we will need to migrate to other planets (or moons) and even live on Space stations. We also need to know about Space to protect this Earth - one of the Space projects in the News this week was crashing a probe into an asteroid to investigate whether we could use this technique in the future to prevent asteroid collisions with Earth that could potentially wipe us out. If we had to address all issues on Earth before exploring Space, we would never get there.
However, I completely agree that more money and research needs to be put into investigating tinnitus and related issues, especially when such a significant fraction of the population suffers from it and can potentially find it life disrupting. I think because it is not physically apparent and is hidden from view, it is not taken seriously enough by the medical profession. Of course, it can have mental health implications and then the medics may have to deal with that, but I believe we are currently naive in that we often treat the symptoms of ailments without properly addressing the root causes. I think that because Doctors don't understand tinnitus well, especially GPs (who can be positively ignorant of it), tinnitus is firmly in this camp.
So, I applaud your suggestion of an innovative method, perhaps using AI, to look for commonality, trends and possible effective treatments of tinnitus. I suppose this would be a statistical approach on existing data without having to do any new physical investigations, but as you imply, solutions may already be in the data waiting to be discovered.
It's a question of priorities. If the JW wasn't started, 10 years ago, say, I see that as a miniscule blip in the cosmological timeline. So the benefit to man would still hopefully be long before we are vaporised by the sun. However, those years might have produced a solution to tinnitus that would help countless peoples' suffering pretty much "now".
Perhaps you're reading this differently to me - we're not asking the NHS directly to fund a biobank, but they are a party with interests in the outcome. Government, bodies which fund medical research, pharmaceutical interests are all named in the Tinnitus Biobank whitepaper.
There are crowd-generated resources out there like StuffThatWorks - stuffthatworks.health/tinnitus - which have the beginnings of a data-sourced approach to tinnitus treatments, but until medical science can identify a biomarker for tinnitus, the approach remains largely anecdotal and subject to limitations on it's large scale applicability.
If the NHS spends £750 million each year (a figure which has probably increased since publication in 2019) on a revolving door of GP appointments, ENT referrals, audiology appointments and counselling sessions without there being any objective way to measure tinnitus severity, it seems to me that £4 million is a drop in the bucket when conditions like sepsis and dementia are experiencing research leaps from access to specific data repositories.
I am, of course, wholly unobjective in this matter.
Thanks for your input. I think we're on the same page really. Obviously a BioBank would be a useful tool and I was trying to put the cost into perspective as did the white paper.
I still can't help feeling that there is probably more than enough information "out there" if the mechanism could be found to trawl it - but this implies the parsing of medical information.
Presumably, if there were ever a treatment for something that had a positive effect on tinnitus even if it weren't the primary objective, that would be recorded digitally. In turn this might lead to a train of thought or obviate the re-inventing of the wheel ...
Otherwise, I presume the proposed BioBank would be started from a clean slate from its inauguration (day zero).
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