meet the funder
hearing health foundation
Problem-Solving a Problem With Volume By Bryan Pollard
Bryan Pollard (above right) with University at Buffalo professor Richard Salvi, Ph.D., a six-time Emerging Research Grants recipient who is a mentor and scientific adviser to Hyperacusis Research Ltd.
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hearing health
hhf.org
My own background with experiencing hyperacusis started a little over a decade ago, ironically from a situation where I was trying to make things safer at my home. I had a tree growing partially over the house, and I was concerned that it might come down on the house during a storm. It was quite large, and on the day it was to be cut down I was at home from work to help make sure it wouldn’t hit the house. After the tree trimmers used chainsaws to cut it down, I was quite relieved that it was down safely. I thought the most dangerous part of the work was done. I assumed they would start cutting up the large chunks of the tree to put on a truck, but they instead used this huge, industrial-sized wood chipper to begin chipping up the entire tree, including the large chunks. I remember thinking, “I don’t think I’ve heard anything that loud in my life!” I stood watching it for a few minutes and walked right by the wood chipper to go have my lunch. Little did I know there was significant damage that had already occurred. After a few days I began experiencing various symptoms, including ear pain, which I learned later is a typical trajectory for hyperacusis patients. Using the usual auditory exams, the ENT could find no detectable damage, and I began visiting other audiologists to find help. None of them even mentioned hyperacusis. I discovered the condition myself after searching online using my symptoms. “Hyperacusis”—or hypersensitivity to sounds— captured what I was experiencing. Eventually I found someone 45 miles away who offered the standard Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) for hyperacusis. I kept with it for over five years, with some modest improvement. My hyperacusis symptoms were fairly typical. When I was exposed to what used to be previously tolerable sounds, my ear would start throbbing but, confusingly, it wouldn’t always happen right away. In fact, sometimes I would think, “Oh, that situation didn’t really bother me,” but after lying down at night my ear would start throbbing. I bought a decibel meter (smartphone apps weren’t available as much at the time) to start noting the decibel levels of my environment to see if they correlated with my symptoms, which included not only throbbing but also ear fullness and tinnitus. I saw that my symptoms would spike in relationship to my surrounding noise levels. My career as an engineer at a high-tech–oriented company was one of solving technical problems. I had studied a number of innovative problemsolving methodologies, including a pattern database. As I started approaching my hyperacusis as I would at work, what became evident to me was that there was no systematic assessment in the research community of the nature of what patients were experiencing. Basic publications about hyperacusis were pretty thin, especially from an in-depth technical perspective, so I started emailing researchers directly. Rather than describing myself as a patient, I reached out saying that I had been trying to understand a particular aspect of their research. I was able to connect with David Mountain, Ph.D., at Boston University, a renowned
