You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adapt your life to it. You always leave 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’re always going in to try new techniques and treatments. After a while, you simply fold your tinnitus into your everyday life.

Mainly, that’s because there’s no cure for tinnitus. But that may be changing. A study published in PLOS Biology appears to give hope that we may be getting closer to a lasting and effective cure for tinnitus. In the meantime, hearing aids can really help.

Tinnitus Has a Cloudy Set of Causes

Tinnitus usually is experienced as a buzzing or ringing in the ear (though, tinnitus could manifest as other sounds as well) that do not have an objective cause. A condition that impacts millions of people, tinnitus is incredibly common.

It’s also a symptom, broadly speaking, and not a cause unto itself. Basically, something causes tinnitus – there’s an underlying issue that produces tinnitus symptoms. It can be hard to narrow down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one reason why a cure is so elusive. There are a number of reasons why tinnitus can develop.

True, most individuals attribute tinnitus to hearing loss of some kind, but even that relationship is murky. There’s a correlation, sure, but not all people who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).

Inflammation: a New Culprit

Research published in PLOS Biology detailed a study conducted by Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor of physiology at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tuscon. Mice who had noise-induced tinnitus were experimented on by Dr. Bao. And the results of these experiments indicated a culprit of tinnitus: inflammation.

According to the scans and tests done on these mice, inflammation was discovered around the areas of the brain responsible for listening. As inflammation is the body’s response to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-related hearing loss might be creating some damage we don’t really understand as of yet.

But this knowledge of inflammation also results in the potential for a new kind of treatment. Because we know (broadly speaking) how to manage inflammation. The symptoms of tinnitus cleared up when the mice were given drugs that impeded inflammation. Or it became impossible to detect any symptoms, at least.

Does This Mean There’s a Pill For Tinnitus?

If you take a long enough view, you can most likely look at this research and see how, one day, there might easily be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that, rather than investing in these numerous coping mechanisms, you can just take a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus at bay.

We may get there if we can overcome a few hurdles:

• Not everybody’s tinnitus will have the same cause; it’s hard to identify (at this point) whether all or even most tinnitus is linked to inflammation of some kind.
• First, these experiments were done on mice. And there’s a lot to do before this specific strategy is considered safe and approved for people.
• Any new approach needs to be demonstrated to be safe; it may take some time to identify specific side effects, complications, or problems connected to these particular inflammation-blocking medications.

So, a pill for tinnitus may be a long way off. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. That’s significant hope for your tinnitus down the road. And, of course, this strategy in treating tinnitus is not the only one presently being researched. Every new development, 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 chronic ringing or buzzing in your ears now, the promise of a far-off pill might give you hope – but not necessarily alleviation. There are contemporary treatments for tinnitus that can produce genuine results, even if they don’t necessarily “cure” the root problem.

There are cognitive treatments that help you learn to ignore tinnitus sounds and others that utilize noise cancellation techniques. Many people also find relief with hearing aids. A cure could be a number of years off, but that doesn’t mean you have to cope with tinnitus by yourself or unassisted. Finding a treatment that works can help you spend more time doing things you love, and less time focusing on 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