You’re living with tinnitus and you’ve learned to adjust your life to it. You always keep the TV on to help you tune out the constant ringing. The loud music at happy hour makes your tinnitus much worse so you avoid going out with your friends. You’re always going in to try new techniques and treatments. Eventually, your tinnitus just becomes something you integrate into your day-to-day life.

The primary reason is that tinnitus has no cure. But that might be changing. We might be getting close to a reliable and permanent cure for tinnitus according to research published in PLOS biology. For now, hearing aids can really be helpful.

The Exact Causes of Tinnitus Are Not Clear

Somebody who has tinnitus will hear a ringing or buzzing (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. In other words, something causes tinnitus – there’s a root problem that produces tinnitus symptoms. One reason why a “cure” for tinnitus is evasive is that these underlying causes can be hard to narrow down. Tinnitus symptoms can develop due to several reasons.

Even the link between tinnitus and hearing loss is murky. There’s a correlation, sure, but not all individuals who have tinnitus also have hearing loss (and vice versa).

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 carried out experiments on mice who had tinnitus caused by noise-induced hearing loss. And what she and her team found points to a tinnitus culprit: inflammation.

According to the scans and tests done on these mice, inflammation was discovered around the areas of the brain responsible for listening. This indicates that some injury is occurring as a consequence of noise-related hearing loss which we presently don’t comprehend because inflammation is the body’s response to injury.

But this discovery of inflammation also results in the possibility of a new type of treatment. Because we know (broadly speaking) how to manage inflammation. When the mice were given drugs that inhibited the observed inflammation response, the symptoms of tinnitus disappeared. Or, at least, those symptoms were no longer observable.

So is There a Magic Pill That Cures Tinnitus?

If you take a long enough view, you can probably view this research and see how, eventually, there may easily 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.

That’s definitely the goal, but there are a number of huge hurdles in the way:

• We need to make sure any new approach is safe; it might take some time to determine particular side effects, complications, or issues connected to these specific inflammation-blocking medications.
• The precise cause of tinnitus will be distinct from one individual to another; whether all or even most cases of tinnitus are linked to some sort of inflammation is still difficult to know.
• First, these experiments were carried out on mice. And there’s a long way to go before this particular strategy is considered safe and approved for humans.

So it might be a while before there’s a pill for tinnitus. But it’s a genuine possibility in the future. That’s significant hope for your tinnitus down the road. And numerous other tinnitus treatments are also 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 persistent buzzing or ringing in your ears today, the promise of a far-off pill may give you hope – but not necessarily alleviation. Even though we don’t have a cure for tinnitus, there are some contemporary treatments that can provide real benefits.

Some approaches include noise-cancellation devices or cognitive therapies created to help you ignore the sounds linked to your tinnitus. Hearing aids frequently provide relief for many individuals. You don’t have to go it alone despite the fact that a cure is likely several years away. Spending less time worrying about the ringing in your ears and more time doing the things you love can happen for you by finding the right treatment.

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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