You learn to adapt to life with tinnitus. You always keep the TV on to help you tune out the persistent ringing. You avoid going out for happy hour with friends because the loud music at the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days. You’re always going in to try new techniques and treatments. Ultimately, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your daily life.
Mostly, that’s because there’s no cure for tinnitus. But that could 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. In the meantime, hearing aids can really be helpful.
Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes
Somebody who is coping with tinnitus will hear a ringing or buzzing (or other noises) that don’t have an outside source. Tinnitus is very common and millions of individuals cope with it to some degree.
Generally speaking, tinnitus is itself a symptom of an underlying problem and not a cause in and of itself. Tinnitus is essentially caused by something else. It can be hard to narrow down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one reason why a cure is so evasive. There are several reasons why tinnitus can occur.
True, most individuals attribute tinnitus to hearing loss of some kind, but even that relationship is unclear. Some people who have tinnitus do have hearing loss but some don’t.
Inflammation: a New Culprit
Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, led a study published in PLOS Biology. Dr. Bao performed 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 seen around the areas of the brain responsible for hearing. This indicates that some injury is occurring as a result of noise-induced hearing loss which we presently don’t understand because inflammation is the body’s response to injury.
But this discovery of inflammation also leads to the potential for a new form of treatment. Because we know (generally speaking) how to deal with inflammation. When the mice were given drugs that inhibited the observed inflammation response, the symptoms of tinnitus disappeared. Or it became impossible to observe any symptoms, at least.
So is There a Magic Pill That Cures Tinnitus?
This research does appear to indicate that, eventually, there might 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.
That’s definitely the goal, but there are numerous big hurdles in the way:
- The exact cause of tinnitus will differ from one individual to another; whether all or even most instances of tinnitus are related to some sort of inflammation is still hard to identify.
- First, these experiments were conducted on mice. Before this strategy is considered safe for humans, there’s still a significant amount of work to do.
- Any new approach needs to be demonstrated to be safe; these inflammation blocking medications will have to be tested over time to rule out side effects and any potential complications.
So it may be a while before we have a pill for tinnitus. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus now, that represents a significant increase in hope. And, of course, this strategy in managing tinnitus is not the only one currently being studied. The cure for tinnitus gets closer and closer with every breakthrough and every bit of new knowledge.
What Can You do Today?
If you have a relentless ringing or buzzing in your ears now, the potential of a far-off pill might provide you with hope – but not necessarily alleviation. There are contemporary treatments for tinnitus that can produce genuine results, even if they don’t necessarily “cure” the underlying issue.
There are cognitive therapies that help you learn to ignore tinnitus sounds and others that employ noise cancellation techniques. Many individuals also get relief with hearing aids. A cure may be many years off, but that doesn’t mean you have to deal with tinnitus by yourself or unassisted. Obtaining 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
