Learning to live with tinnitus is often how you manage it. To help tune it out you keep the television on. You skip going dancing because the loudness of the bar makes your tinnitus worse for days after. You check in with experts regularly to try out new solutions and new techniques. Eventually, your tinnitus just becomes something you work into your everyday life.

Tinnitus doesn't have a cure so you feel powerless. But that may be changing. New research published in PLOS Biology shows that an reliable and permanent cure for tinnitus might be on the horizon.

Causes of Tinnitus

You're suffering from tinnitus if you hear a ringing or buzzing (or at times other sounds) with no objective cause. A condition that impacts over 50 million people in the United States alone, tinnitus is incredibly common.

It's also a symptom, generally speaking, and not a cause in and of itself. Put simply, something triggers tinnitus – there's a root problem that creates tinnitus symptoms. One reason why a "cure" for tinnitus is challenging is that these root causes can be difficult to narrow down. Tinnitus symptoms can occur due to numerous reasons.

True, most people connect tinnitus to hearing loss of some type, but even that relationship is not clear. There's a connection, certainly, but not all people who suffer from tinnitus also have loss of hearing (and vice versa).

A New Culprit: Inflammation

Dr. Shaowen Bao, who is associate professor of physiology at Arizona College of Medicine in Tuscon has recently released research. Mice that had tinnitus caused by noise induced hearing loss were experimented on by Dr. Bao. And a new culprit for tinnitus was uncovered by her and her team: inflammation.

Inflammation was seen around the brain areas used for hearing when scans were done to these mice. These tests indicate that noise-induced hearing loss is causing some unidentified damage because inflammation is the body's response to damage.

But this finding of inflammation also leads to the possibility of a new type of therapy. Because we know (generally speaking) how to handle inflammation. The tinnitus symptoms disappear when the mice were treated for inflammation. Or at the very least there were no longer observable symptoms of tinnitus.

Does This Mean There's a Pill to Treat Tinnitus?

One day there will likely be a pill for tinnitus. Imagine that–rather than counting on these various coping elements, you can just pop a pill in the morning and keep your tinnitus under control.

That's clearly the objective, but there are different substantial hurdles in the way:

  • These experiments were performed first on mice. And there's a long way to go before this particular strategy is safe and authorized for use on humans.
  • There are many causes for tinnitus; Which specific forms of tinnitus are related to inflammation is still not certain.
  • We still have to establish whether any new strategy is safe; these inflammation blocking medications might have harmful side effects that could take some time to identify.

So it could be pretty far off before we get a pill for tinnitus. But it isn't impossible. If you have tinnitus now, that means a significant boost in hope. And, obviously, this strategy in dealing with tinnitus is not the only one presently being researched. That cure gets closer and closer with every bit of knowledge and every new discovery.

Ca Anything be Done Now?

If you have a continual ringing or buzzing in your ears now, the potential of a far off pill could provide you with hope – but not necessarily relief. Modern treatments might not "cure" your tinnitus but they do give real results.

Being able to tune out or ignore tinnitus sounds, sometimes utilizing noise canceling headphones or cognitive therapies is what modern strategies are striving to do. A cure could be several years away, but that doesn't mean you have to cope with tinnitus alone or unassisted. Spending less time being stressed about the buzzing or ringing in your ears and more time doing what you love is the reason why you need to let us help you find a treatment that works for you. Get in touch with us for a consultation today.