You learn to adjust to life with tinnitus. You always keep the TV on to help you tune out the persistent ringing. You refrain from going out for happy hour with coworkers because the loud music at the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days. You’re always going in to try new techniques and therapies. After a while, you simply fold your tinnitus into your everyday life.
The main reason is that tinnitus has no cure. But they could be getting close. A study published in PLOS Biology appears to give hope that we may be getting closer to a lasting and reliable cure for tinnitus. For now, hearing aids can really help.
Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes
Tinnitus normally manifests 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 really common and millions of people deal with it on some level.
It’s also a symptom, broadly speaking, and not a cause unto itself. In other words, something causes tinnitus – there’s a root problem that produces tinnitus symptoms. It can be difficult to pin down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one of the reasons why a cure is so elusive. There are a number of reasons why tinnitus can develop.
True, most individuals attribute tinnitus to hearing loss of some kind, but even that relationship is unclear. Some individuals who have tinnitus do have hearing loss but some don’t.
Inflammation: a New Culprit
Research published in PLOS Biology outlined a study directed 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 caused by noise-induced hearing loss. And the results of these experiments pointed to a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.
According to the scans and tests carried out on these mice, inflammation was seen around the areas of the brain responsible for listening. As inflammation is the body’s reaction to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-induced hearing loss might be causing some damage we don’t completely understand as yet.
But new forms of treatment are also made possible by this knowledge of inflammation. Because we know (broadly speaking) how to deal with inflammation. When the mice were given drugs that impeded the observed inflammation response, the symptoms of tinnitus went away. Or, at least, those symptoms were no longer observable.
So is There a Magic Pill That Cures Tinnitus?
If you take a long enough look, you can probably look at this research and see how, eventually, there may easily be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that, instead of investing in these various coping mechanisms, you can just take a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus at bay.
We might get there if we can tackle a few hurdles:
- First, these experiments were conducted on mice. And there’s a long way to go before this particular strategy is considered safe and approved for people.
- 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 concerns.
- Not everyone’s tinnitus will have the same cause; it’s hard to know (at this point) whether all or even most tinnitus is linked to inflammation of some kind.
So it might be a while before there’s a pill for tinnitus. But it’s not at all impossible. That’s considerable hope for your tinnitus down the road. And various 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?
For now, people who suffered from tinnitus should feel hopeful that in the future there will be a cure for tinnitus. Although we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some contemporary treatments that can provide real results.
Some strategies include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies created to help you ignore the sounds connected to your tinnitus. Hearing aids often provide relief for many people. A cure could be a number of years off, but that doesn’t mean you need to cope with tinnitus alone or unaided. Obtaining a treatment that works can help you spend more time doing things you love, and less time thinking about that buzzing or ringing in your ears.
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