Misophonia: When Life's Noises Drive You Mad PDF

**When Life\'s Noises Drive You Mad** Misophonia **got** its name just a few years ago, and it is not officially listed as a diagnosis in any medical manuals. Many doctors **have** never heard of it, and if patients do mention their symptoms, they are sometimes dismissed or diagnosed **with** a moo...

**When Life\'s Noises Drive You Mad** Misophonia **got** its name just a few years ago, and it is not officially listed as a diagnosis in any medical manuals. Many doctors **have** never heard of it, and if patients do mention their symptoms, they are sometimes dismissed or diagnosed **with** a mood disorder.  While many people with misophonia also **have** anxiety or depression, not all of them **do**. There are few studies on misophonia, and experts disagree **over** whether it should be classified as its own disorder or a subset of another. Because it\'s so little understood, the people around those suffering **from** it have trouble believing or understanding how painful their symptoms can be. Some people with misophonia are troubled by sniffling, throat-clearing or coughing. A small, recent study **offers** potential new insight into how misophonia works. \"We\'re pretty convinced that we\'ve found some very good **evidence** for relating this disorder to particular patterns of brain **activity**.\" says [Phillip Gander](http://myweb.uiowa.edu/pgander/), who studies how the brain makes sense **of** sound at the University of Iowa. He was part of a team that [published a study](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31530-5) in *Current Biology* in 2017 that **suggests** that the brains of people with misophonia respond differently **to** certain sounds. The team looked at 20 adults with misophonia and 22 without it. They had the participants rate the unpleasantness of different sounds, **including** common trigger sounds like eating and breathing, **universally** disliked sounds like nails on a chalkboard, and neutral sounds like footsteps or a bird chirping. \"What happened was that the **response** to the neutral sounds and negative sounds were the same in both groups,\" he says. But the people with misophonia rated the eating and breathing sounds as highly disturbing. Those without the condition did not.  The ones with misophonia also showed classic **signs** of stress when hearing these trigger sounds: \"Their heart rate increased and it made their palms sweat more,\" he says. Also, the people with misophonia **appeared** to have some unusual brain activity when the trigger sounds **were** played. Crinkling a chip bag or other rustling sounds are cited as noises that can **set off** someone\'s misophonia. \"In the misophonia group, the activity was far greater in **particular** parts of their brain,\" Gander explains --- including parts of the brain that process emotions. It\'s an interesting study, agrees [Steven Taylor](https://psychiatry.ubc.ca/person/steven-taylor/), a professor in the **department** of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia who specializes **in** mood disorders. But there are a number of important problems with it, he says. First, it was very small, and the subjects\' misophonia was diagnosed with only a short questionnaire. \"In studies of clinical conditions like misophonia, diagnosis by questionnaire is typically inadequate. A face-to-face interview with a trained clinician (e.g., a psychologist) is typically needed,\" he says. Also, the study doesn\'t show what **causes** misophonia, only that it is associated with some brain regions and their connections, he adds.