الفهرس 
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Abstract
Tinnitus is a phantom sound perceived without an actual external auditory stimulus, that may lead to devastating neurocognitive consequences. It was suggested that impaired sensory memory processing may be a candidate mechanism underlying tinnitus persistence.
The current study aimed to test the hypothesis that auditory sensory memory may be impaired in patients with tinnitus using mainly the mismatch negativity (MMN) with short as well as long inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), as the later found to be more reflective of the auditory sensory memory status.
The mismatch negativity evaluation in the two conditions (short and long ISIs) as well as behavioural memory tasks were performed for all the included tinnitus patients with normal hearing thresholds (n = 20), as well as for age, gender, education and hearing matched control group (n = 20). In addition, the mismatch negativity parameters measured with long ISI of tinnitus patients were enrolled in a correlation analysis with the different tinnitus scores.
The study results showed a significant reduction in MMN amplitude and magnitude measured with long ISI in tinnitus patients compared to their matched control group. Additionally, the tinnitus patients showed significantly worse performance scores in digit span backward memory task. Moreover, the MMN amplitude/magnitude (long ISI) in tinnitus patients were found to be significantly positively correlated with digit span backward task scores, and negatively correlated with emotional sub-scale scores of the tinnitus handicap inventory and tinnitus loudness.
These results suggests the presence of an impaired auditory sensory memory processing in tinnitus patients, that may cause tinnitus persistence and prevents the habituation process for tinnitus signal. Considering these results, the MMN amplitude could be suggested as a possible objective index for monitoring tinnitus during tinnitus rehabilitation programs