You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adjust your life to it. You always leave the TV on to help you tune out the continuous ringing. The loud music at happy hour makes your tinnitus much worse so you refrain from going out with your friends. You’re always going in to try new techniques and therapies. Over time, you simply fold your tinnitus into your everyday life.
Mostly, that’s because there isn’t a cure for tinnitus. But that could be changing. We may be getting close to an effective and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. In the meantime, hearing aids can really be helpful.
Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes
Someone who is coping with tinnitus will hear a ringing or buzzing (or other sounds) that don’t have an external source. Tinnitus is really common and millions of individuals deal with it to some degree.
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 issue that produces tinnitus symptoms. It can be hard to narrow down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one of the reasons why a cure is so evasive. Tinnitus symptoms can develop due to a number of reasons.
Even the relationship between tinnitus and hearing loss is murky. There’s a link, sure, but not all individuals who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).
Inflammation: a New Culprit
Research published in PLOS Biology detailed a study conducted 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 indicated a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.
Tests and scans done on these mice found that the areas of the brain in control of listening and hearing persistently had significant inflammation. As inflammation is the body’s response to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-induced hearing loss could be creating some damage we don’t completely understand yet.
But this knowledge of inflammation also leads to the potential for a new kind of treatment. Because we know (broadly speaking) how to handle inflammation. 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.
So is There a Magic Pill That Cures Tinnitus?
This research does appear to suggest that, in the long run, there may actually be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that, instead of investing in these various coping mechanisms, you can simply pop a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus at bay.
That’s definitely the goal, but there are several large hurdles in the way:
- We need to be sure any new strategy is safe; these inflammation blocking medicines will have to be tested over time to rule out side effects and any potential concerns.
- The precise cause of tinnitus will differ from one individual to another; it’s hard to identify (at this time) whether all or even most tinnitus is related to inflammation of some type.
- First, these experiments were done on mice. Before this strategy is considered safe for people, there’s still a substantial amount of work to do.
So, a pill for tinnitus may be a long way off. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a substantial increase in hope. And various other tinnitus treatments are also being researched. The cure for tinnitus gets closer and closer with every development and every bit of new knowledge.
What Can You do Today?
If you have a persistent buzzing or ringing in your ears today, the promise of a far-off pill may give you hope – but not necessarily relief. Although we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some modern treatments that can produce real benefits.
Some methods include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies created to help you ignore the sounds related to your tinnitus. Many people also get relief with hearing aids. A cure might be a number of years off, but that doesn’t mean you need to cope with tinnitus alone or unassisted. Spending less time thinking about the ringing in your ears and more time doing the things you love can happen for you by finding 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