You learn to adapt to life with tinnitus. In order to drown out the continuous ringing, you always keep the TV on. The loud music at happy hour makes your tinnitus much worse so you refrain from going out with your friends. You’re always making appointments to try new techniques and therapies. Over time, you simply fold your tinnitus into your daily life.
The main reason is that tinnitus has no cure. But they may be getting close. We may be getting close to an effective and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. Until then, hearing aids can be really helpful.
The Exact Causes of Tinnitus Are Unclear
Tinnitus normally is experienced as a buzzing or ringing in the ear (though, tinnitus could manifest as other sounds as well) that do not have an external cause. A disorder that impacts millions of people, tinnitus is incredibly common.
It’s also a symptom, generally speaking, and not a cause unto itself. Tinnitus is essentially caused by something else. One reason why a “cure” for tinnitus is evasive is that these underlying causes can be hard to pin down. Tinnitus symptoms can develop due to several reasons.
Even the connection between tinnitus and hearing loss is not well understood. There’s a connection, sure, but not all people who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).
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.
Tests and scans carried out on these mice revealed that the parts of the brain responsible for listening and hearing persistently had significant inflammation. 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 really comprehend yet.
But new types of treatment are also made available by this knowledge of inflammation. Because inflammation is something we know how to address. When the mice were given drugs that impeded the observed inflammation reaction, the symptoms of tinnitus went away. Or it became impossible to detect any symptoms, at least.
Does This Mean There’s a Pill For Tinnitus?
This research does appear to suggest that, eventually, there may actually 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 could get there if we can overcome a few hurdles:
- Any new approach needs to be proven safe; it may take some time to identify specific side effects, complications, or issues related to these particular inflammation-blocking medicines.
- First, these experiments were carried out on mice. And there’s a lot to do before this specific strategy is deemed safe and approved for humans.
- Not everyone’s tinnitus will have the same cause; it’s difficult to identify (at this stage) whether all or even most tinnitus is connected to inflammation of some type.
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 now, that represents a considerable increase in hope. And, of course, this strategy in managing tinnitus isn’t the only one presently 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 with tinnitus should feel optimistic that in the future there will be a cure for tinnitus. There are contemporary treatments for tinnitus that can produce genuine results, even if they don’t necessarily “cure” the root problem.
Some strategies include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies created to help you ignore the sounds related to your tinnitus. Many individuals also get relief with hearing aids. You don’t have to go it alone in spite of the fact that a cure is likely several years away. Finding a treatment that is effective can help you spend more time doing what 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