I found this What Is Pulsatile Tinnitus? | American Tinnitus Association. Which of course is different from the ringing type. There’s a nice list of causes, with AVM being one of them
Atherosclerosis is a good point. The whooshing sound is basically disrupted flow in a vessel past your ear. Anything that creates a rough flow of blood could create that noise in a vessel near your ear (I’d have thought).
In my case, I had a DAVF which was basically shunting blood straight from an artery in the back of my head directly into my right transverse sinus. The disrupted flow of the arterial pressure blood into the sinus was so high pressure, it flowed both ways along my transverse sinuses and thence past my ears (both ears). It is more normal to have it flow into one of the sigmoid sinuses and be heard in just one ear.
This was the page that helped me self- diagnose with a dural fistula back in 2016 because of the bruit.
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Mine was presumably caused by a head trauma I’d received early on and had it for decades. I sorely missed it when my rupture was repaired, should’ve seen the look on the Neurosurgeon’s face when I told her to put it back so I could get to sleep. Then it finally came back and she had to go back in and stop it again with the stent🤣
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Just in case our members don’t know, @DickD isn’t talking about the sinus as in a sinus headache caused by allergies when he’s talking about his AVM…it’s blood vessels Transverse sinuses - Wikipedia
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… the big draining veins of the meningeal layer known as the “dura mater”. As an AVM patient, I’m focussed on veins rather than arteries!
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I have honestly never heard of this before. I have had an mri, mra, and angiogram. Wouldn’t they have found something like that by now?
I have had pulsatile tinnitus as a symptom for a while now, and have previously described it but didn’t know what it was called. they wrote it off as head pounding.
When I went in for the angiogram. They did say that one aneurysm was practically laying on top of another vein or artery. I don’t remember which. But it “could be pressing on it when inflates, or gets bigger. Is that the same thing? I can feel the pin point of pain on my temple when this happens. I just got through a 3 day migraine of being sick and in bed.
It’s not the same thing but I guess an aneurysm may pulse each heartbeat so it could be something emanating from that.
An AVM is usually detected on MRI or catheter angiogram and you’ll have had those. May be worth mentioning an AVM as a possible cause for the pulsatile tinnitus when you next speak to them. My opinion is that doctors don’t really like it when we come up with the ideas but what the heck. An AVM may well be much rarer than an aneurysm, so it is unlikely.
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I get really bad migraines. Every single time I move my head in a bending down or looking up, I get dizzy and sick then my head starts to pound, along with the pusatile tinnitus. Laundry and putting away dishes are the worst for me. The doctors have called it positional migraines. My eyes will water when this happens. That is the only thing I can see that might resemble an avm symptom.
Funny thing though, I told them I thought I had an aneurysm. Told them my symptoms got tested, and sure enough, it Turns out I did. And I had three.
my body speaks to me very loudly.
Almost certainly you won’t have an AVM but an angiogram is very targeted: unless the arteries they went to illuminate for your aneurysms happen to be the one leaking directly into a vein, they wouldn’t see it on an angiogram. MRI yes. Angiogram maybe no.
Most “incidental” AVM patients (ones whose AVM is discovered pre bleed) are people who’ve had a MRI or CT scan looking for something else, or checking after (e.g. a car) accident/trauma that all is ok. Likewise if you’ve had a bleed from one of your annies, I’d expect the scan to look for trouble would have shown up any AVM.
Again usually, AVMs are considered congenital rather than than acquired so long standing rather than novel, acquired. Theory on DAVFs is more open to acquisition.
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