You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adapt your life to it. In order to tune out the continuous ringing, you always keep the TV on. You refrain from going out for happy hour with coworkers because the loud music at the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days. You make appointments regularly to try out new therapies and new treatments. Eventually, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your daily life.
The main reason is that tinnitus has no cure. But they could be getting close. We might be getting close to an effective and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. Until that happens, hearing aids can be really helpful.
The Exact Causes of Tinnitus Are Not Clear
Tinnitus usually is experienced as a buzzing or ringing in the ear (though, tinnitus could manifest as other sounds as well) that do not have an external cause. Tinnitus is quite common and millions of individuals deal with it on some level.
Generally speaking, tinnitus is itself a symptom of an underlying condition and not a cause in and of itself. Basically, something causes tinnitus – there’s an underlying problem that produces tinnitus symptoms. It can be hard to narrow down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one reason why a cure is so elusive. Tinnitus symptoms can manifest due to a number of reasons.
True, most people attribute tinnitus to hearing loss of some kind, but even that relationship is unclear. There’s a connection, sure, but not all people who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).
A New Culprit: Inflammation
Research published in PLOS Biology outlined a study led by Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor of physiology at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tuscon. Dr. Bao carried out experiments on mice who had tinnitus triggered by noise-induced hearing loss. And the results of these experiments pointed to a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.
Tests and scans done on these mice found that the parts of the brain responsible for listening and hearing typically had significant inflammation. As inflammation is the body’s response to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-related hearing loss may be causing some damage we don’t completely understand as yet.
But this knowledge of inflammation also leads to the potential for a new form of treatment. Because inflammation is something we know how to manage. The symptoms of tinnitus cleared up when the mice were given drugs that impeded inflammation. Or it became impossible to detect any symptoms, at least.
Does This Mean There’s a Pill For Tinnitus?
If you take a long enough view, you can probably view this research and see how, one day, there could easily be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine if you could just take a pill in the morning and keep tinnitus at bay all day without needing to turn to all those coping mechanisms.
We could get there if we can overcome a few hurdles:
- The precise cause of tinnitus will differ from person to person; it’s hard to know (at this point) whether all or even most tinnitus is related to inflammation of some sort.
- Mice were the focus of these experiments. Before this strategy is considered safe for people, there’s still a significant amount of work to do.
- Any new approach needs to be proven safe; these inflammation blocking medications will need to be tested over time to rule out side effects and any potential complications.
So, a pill for tinnitus may be a long way off. But it’s not at all impossible. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a significant increase in hope. And numerous other tinnitus treatments are also being studied. The cure for tinnitus gets closer and closer with every discovery and every bit of new knowledge.
Is There Anything You Can Do?
In the meantime, individuals with tinnitus should feel hopeful that in the future there will be a cure for tinnitus. There are modern treatments for tinnitus that can provide genuine results, even if they don’t necessarily “cure” the root issue.
There are cognitive treatments that help you learn to ignore tinnitus noises and others that utilize noise cancellation techniques. Many individuals also get relief with hearing aids. You don’t have to go it alone in spite of the fact that a cure is likely several years away. Spending less time worrying about the ringing in your ears and more time doing the things you love can happen for you by getting the right treatment.
References
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000307
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/brain-inflammation-identified-potential-target-treat-tinnitus