You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adapt your life to it. You always keep the TV 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 make appointments routinely to try new therapies and new treatments. Ultimately, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your daily life.

The primary reason is that tinnitus can’t be cured. But that might be changing. We might be getting close to an effective and lasting cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. 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 buzzing or ringing (or other sounds) that don’t have an external source. Tinnitus is really common and millions of individuals deal with it on some level.

Generally speaking, tinnitus is itself a symptom of an underlying condition and not a cause in and of itself. Basically, something causes tinnitus – there’s an underlying problem that creates tinnitus symptoms. It can be difficult to pin down the cause of tinnitus and that’s one reason why a cure is so elusive. There are several reasons why tinnitus can develop.

Even the relationship between tinnitus and hearing loss is not well understood. Some people who have tinnitus do have hearing loss but some don’t.

A New Culprit: Inflammation

Research published in PLOS Biology outlined a study directed by Dr. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor of physiology at the Arizona College of Medicine in Tuscon. Dr. Bao performed experiments on mice that had tinnitus triggered by noise-induced hearing loss. 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 observed around the areas of the brain responsible for hearing. As inflammation is the body’s response to damage, this finding does suggest that noise-induced hearing loss might be causing some damage we don’t really comprehend as yet.

But this knowledge of inflammation also leads to the possibility of a new kind of treatment. 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 weren’t observable anymore.

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, eventually, there could easily be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that, instead of investing in these numerous coping mechanisms, you can just take a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus at bay.

We might get there if we can tackle a few hurdles:

• We need to be certain any new approach is safe; it may take some time to determine specific side effects, complications, or problems connected to these specific inflammation-blocking medicines.
• Not everyone’s tinnitus will have the same cause; whether all or even most instances of tinnitus are linked to some kind of inflammation is still difficult to identify.
• Mice were the subject of these experiments. And there’s a long way to go before this specific strategy is considered safe and approved for people.

So, a pill for tinnitus may be a long way off. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. If you have tinnitus today, that represents a considerable increase in hope. And, obviously, this approach in treating tinnitus isn’t the only one currently being explored. Every new discovery, 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 today, the potential of a far-off pill may provide you with hope – but not necessarily alleviation. Even though we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some contemporary treatments that can produce real benefits.

Some strategies include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies designed to help you ignore the sounds linked to your tinnitus. Hearing aids often offer relief for many people. You don’t have to go it alone despite 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.

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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