You learn to adjust to living with tinnitus. You always keep the TV on to help you tune out the constant ringing. You refrain from going out for happy hour with friends because the loud music at the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days. You make appointments regularly to try out new therapies and new techniques. Ultimately, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your daily life.
The main reason is that tinnitus can’t be cured. But that might be changing. Research published in PLOS Biology appears to offer hope that we could be getting closer to a permanent and reliable cure for tinnitus. Until then, hearing aids can be really helpful.
Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes
Tinnitus usually is experienced as a buzzing or ringing in the ear (though, tinnitus could present as other sounds too) that do not have an external cause. Tinnitus is really common and millions of individuals cope 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 issue that causes 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 elusive. There are a number of reasons why tinnitus can manifest.
Even the link between tinnitus and hearing loss is murky. Some individuals 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 with noise-related tinnitus were experimented on by Dr. Bao. And the results of these experiments indicated a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.
According to the tests and scans carried out on these mice, inflammation was discovered around the areas of the brain responsible for listening. As inflammation is the body’s reaction to damage, this finding does indicate that noise-induced hearing loss could be causing some damage we don’t fully understand yet.
But this discovery of inflammation also results in the possibility of a new form of treatment. Because we know (broadly speaking) how to manage inflammation. When the mice were given drugs that impeded the observed inflammation reaction, the symptoms of tinnitus disappeared. Or it became impossible to observe any symptoms, at least.
Does This Mean There’s a Pill For Tinnitus?
If you take a long enough look, you can most likely look at 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.
That’s definitely the goal, but there are a number of huge hurdles in the way:
- Not everybody’s tinnitus will have the same cause; whether all or even most instances of tinnitus are related to some sort of inflammation is still hard to know.
- Any new approach needs to be proven safe; it might take some time to determine specific side effects, complications, or issues linked to these specific inflammation-blocking medicines.
- First, these experiments were conducted on mice. Before this strategy is considered safe for people, there’s still a substantial amount of work to do.
So it may be a while before there’s a pill for tinnitus. But it’s no longer impossible. If you have tinnitus now, that represents a significant increase in hope. And numerous other tinnitus treatments are also being researched. Every new discovery, every new bit of knowledge, brings that cure for tinnitus just a little bit closer.
Is There Anything You Can Do?
For now, individuals with 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 modern treatments that can provide real benefits.
Some methods include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies created to help you ignore the sounds linked to your tinnitus. Many people also get relief with hearing aids. A cure might be many years off, but that doesn’t mean you have to cope with tinnitus by yourself or unaided. Spending less time thinking 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
