You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adjust your life to it. You always keep the television on to help you tune out the constant ringing. The loud music at happy hour makes your tinnitus a lot worse so you avoid going out with your friends. You’re always making appointments to try new techniques and therapies. After a while, you simply integrate your tinnitus into your everyday life.
Mostly, that’s because there’s no cure for tinnitus. But that may be changing. We may be getting close to a reliable and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. Until then, hearing aids can be really helpful.
Tinnitus Has a Murky Set of Causes
Somebody who has tinnitus will hear a buzzing or ringing (or other noises) that don’t have an external source. A condition that impacts millions of people, tinnitus is extremely common.
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 causes tinnitus symptoms. It can be hard to pin down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one reason why a cure is so elusive. There are numerous reasons why tinnitus can manifest.
Even the connection between tinnitus and hearing loss is not well understood. Some people who have tinnitus do have hearing loss but some don’t.
A New Culprit: Inflammation
Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, led a study published in PLOS Biology. Mice who had noise-related tinnitus were experimented on by Dr. Bao. And the results of these experiments indicated a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.
Scans and tests carried out on these mice revealed that the parts of the brain in control of listening and hearing persistently had considerable inflammation. This indicates that some damage is happening as a consequence of noise-induced hearing loss which we presently don’t comprehend because inflammation is the body’s reaction to damage.
But new kinds of treatment are also made possible by this discovery of inflammation. Because inflammation is something we know how to deal with. When the mice were given drugs that inhibited the observed inflammation reaction, the symptoms of tinnitus went away. Or, at least, those symptoms were no longer observable.
Does This Mean There’s a Pill For Tinnitus?
If you take a long enough view, you can most likely view this research and see how, eventually, 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 may get there if we can tackle a few hurdles:
- First, these experiments were conducted on mice. And there’s a lot to do before this particular strategy is considered safe and approved for humans.
- Any new approach needs to be proven safe; it could take some time to determine specific side effects, complications, or issues connected to these specific inflammation-blocking medications.
- Not everybody’s tinnitus will be caused the same way; whether all or even most cases of tinnitus are connected to some sort of inflammation is still difficult to identify.
So it might be a while before there’s a pill for tinnitus. But it’s a real possibility in the future. That’s significant hope for your tinnitus down the road. And numerous other tinnitus treatments are also being studied. Every new discovery, every new bit of knowledge, brings that cure for tinnitus just a little bit closer.
What Can You do Now?
In the meantime, people with tinnitus should feel hopeful that in the future there will be a cure for tinnitus. There are modern treatments for tinnitus that can produce genuine results, even if they don’t necessarily “cure” the root problem.
Some approaches include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies designed to help you ignore the sounds related to your tinnitus. Many individuals also get relief with hearing aids. You don’t need to go it alone in spite of the fact that a cure is probably 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
