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 continuous ringing. You avoid going out for happy hour with coworkers because the loud music at the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days. You make appointments routinely to try new therapies and new treatments. Ultimately, your tinnitus just becomes something you fold into your daily life.
The primary reason is that tinnitus can’t be cured. But that might be changing. We might be getting close to a reliable and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. In the meantime, hearing aids can really help.
Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes
Someone who has tinnitus will hear a buzzing or ringing (or other noises) that don’t have an outside source. Tinnitus is really common and millions of people cope with it on some level.
It’s also a symptom, broadly speaking, and not itself a cause. Tinnitus is generally caused by something else. It can be hard to pin down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one of the reasons why a cure is so elusive. There are several reasons why tinnitus can occur.
True, most people attribute tinnitus to hearing loss of some type, but even that relationship is murky. There’s a link, sure, but not all people who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).
A New Culprit: Inflammation
Research published in PLOS Biology detailed 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 that had tinnitus caused by noise-induced hearing loss. And what she and her colleagues found indicates a tinnitus culprit: inflammation.
According to the scans and tests carried out on these mice, inflammation was observed in the areas of the brain responsible for hearing. As inflammation is the body’s reaction to damage, this finding does indicate that noise-induced hearing loss may be creating some damage we don’t really understand yet.
But this knowledge of inflammation also leads to the potential for a new form of treatment. Because we know (generally speaking) how to handle inflammation. When the mice were given drugs that inhibited the observed inflammation reaction, the symptoms of tinnitus disappeared. Or, at least, those symptoms weren’t observable anymore.
So is There a Magic Pill That Cures Tinnitus?
This research does appear to indicate that, in the long run, there may actually be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that, instead of investing in these numerous coping mechanisms, you can simply pop a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus at bay.
We could get there if we can overcome a few hurdles:
- First, these experiments were carried out on mice. Before this strategy is considered safe for people, there’s still a substantial amount of work to do.
- We need to make sure any new strategy is safe; it might take some time to determine particular side effects, complications, or problems related to these particular inflammation-blocking medicines.
- The exact cause of tinnitus will be distinct from person to person; it’s hard to know (at this time) whether all or even most tinnitus is connected to inflammation of some sort.
So it might be a while before we have a pill for tinnitus. But it’s a real possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a significant increase in hope. And, of course, this approach in treating tinnitus is not the only one presently being explored. Every new discovery, every new bit of knowledge, brings that cure for tinnitus just a little bit closer.
Is There Anything You Can Do?
If you have a persistent ringing or buzzing in your ears now, the potential of a far-off pill might provide you with hope – but not necessarily relief. Although we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some contemporary treatments that can provide real benefits.
There are cognitive treatments that help you learn to ignore tinnitus sounds and others that use noise cancellation strategies. Many people also get relief with hearing aids. A cure may be a number of years off, but that doesn’t mean you need to cope with tinnitus by yourself or unaided. Finding a treatment that works can help you spend more time doing what you love, and less time thinking about that buzzing or ringing in your ears.
Call Today to Set Up an Appointment
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