You learn to adjust to life with tinnitus. You always leave the TV on to help you tune out the continuous ringing. The loud music at happy hour makes your tinnitus a lot worse so you avoid going out with your friends. You make appointments regularly to try new therapies and new techniques. Eventually, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your day-to-day life.
The main reason is that tinnitus has no cure. But that might be changing. Research published in PLOS Biology appears to give hope that we may be getting closer to a lasting and effective cure for tinnitus. Until then, hearing aids can be really helpful.
Tinnitus Has a Murky Set of Causes
Someone who has tinnitus will hear a ringing or buzzing (or other sounds) that don’t have an external source. A condition that impacts millions of individuals, tinnitus is extremely common.
Generally speaking, tinnitus is itself a symptom of an underlying problem 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 reason why a cure is so elusive. There are a number of reasons why tinnitus can develop.
Even the link between tinnitus and hearing loss is murky. Some people who have tinnitus do have hearing loss but some don’t.
A New Culprit: Inflammation
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 performed experiments on mice that had tinnitus triggered by noise-induced hearing loss. And what she and her colleagues found indicates a tinnitus culprit: inflammation.
According to the tests and scans performed on these mice, inflammation was discovered in the areas of the brain responsible for hearing. As inflammation is the body’s reaction to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-induced hearing loss might be creating some damage we don’t completely comprehend as of yet.
But this knowledge of inflammation also brings about the possibility of a new form of treatment. Because we know (generally 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.
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, one day, there may easily be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine if you could just pop a pill in the morning and keep tinnitus at bay all day without having to turn to all those coping mechanisms.
We could get there if we can tackle a few hurdles:
- We need to make sure any new strategy is safe; it may take some time to determine particular side effects, complications, or problems linked to these specific inflammation-blocking medicines.
- Not everybody’s tinnitus will be caused the same way; it’s difficult to identify (at this point) whether all or even most tinnitus is connected to inflammation of some type.
- First, these experiments were carried out on mice. And there’s a long way to go before this specific approach is deemed safe and approved for people.
So it might be a while before there’s a pill for tinnitus. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a substantial increase in hope. And several other tinnitus treatments are also being researched. 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, people with tinnitus should feel hopeful that in the future there will be a cure for tinnitus. There are contemporary treatments for tinnitus that can provide real 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 employ noise cancellation strategies. Many individuals also find relief with hearing aids. A cure may be a number of years off, but that doesn’t mean you have to deal with tinnitus alone or unassisted. Finding a treatment that is effective 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
