You learn to adjust to life with tinnitus. In order to tune out the constant ringing, you always keep the TV on. You avoid 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 treatments. After a while, you simply integrate your tinnitus into your daily life.
Mainly, that’s because there’s no cure for tinnitus. But they could be getting close. A study published in PLOS Biology seems to give hope that we could be getting closer to a permanent and reliable cure for tinnitus. For now, hearing aids can really help.
Tinnitus Has a Murky Set of Causes
Tinnitus usually is experienced as a buzzing or ringing in the ear (though, tinnitus could manifest as other sounds too) that do not have an objective cause. A condition that affects millions of individuals, tinnitus is extremely common.
Generally speaking, tinnitus is itself a symptom of an underlying condition and not a cause in and of itself. Tinnitus is generally caused by something else. One reason why a “cure” for tinnitus is elusive is that these underlying causes can be difficult to narrow down. There are several 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
Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, led a study published in PLOS Biology. Dr. Bao carried out experiments on mice that had tinnitus caused by noise-induced hearing loss. And what she and her team found points to a tinnitus culprit: inflammation.
According to the tests and scans performed on these mice, inflammation was seen in the areas of the brain responsible for hearing. This suggests that some injury is happening as a result of noise-related hearing loss which we presently don’t comprehend because inflammation is the body’s reaction to injury.
But new types of treatment are also made available by this knowledge of inflammation. Because inflammation is something we know how to manage. When the mice were given drugs that inhibited the observed inflammation reaction, 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 look, you can most likely view this research and see how, one day, there could 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.
That’s certainly the goal, but there are a number of huge hurdles in the way:
- Any new approach needs to be demonstrated to be safe; it could take some time to determine specific side effects, complications, or issues connected to these specific inflammation-blocking medicines.
- First, these experiments were carried out on mice. Before this strategy is considered safe for people, there’s still a significant amount of work to do.
- Not everybody’s tinnitus will be caused the same way; it’s difficult to know (at this point) whether all or even most tinnitus is linked to inflammation of some kind.
So, a pill for tinnitus might be a long way off. But it’s a real possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a considerable increase in hope. And, of course, this strategy in managing tinnitus is not the only one presently being researched. The cure for tinnitus gets closer and closer with every discovery and every bit of new knowledge.
What Can You do Now?
If you have a chronic ringing or buzzing in your ears today, the potential of a far-off pill may provide you with hope – but not necessarily relief. Even though we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some modern treatments that can produce real benefits.
There are cognitive therapies that help you learn to ignore tinnitus sounds and others that employ noise cancellation strategies. Hearing aids often offer relief for many individuals. You don’t need to go it alone in spite of the fact that a cure is probably several years away. 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.
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