The UK’s Newcastle University has conducted a recent study into tinnitus and may have found a way to reduce symptoms for sufferers.
The study, led by Dr Ekaterina Yukhnovich, has found that people who suffer from the condition, which includes symptoms such as ringing, buzzing, and hissing in their ears, experienced improvements in their quality of life thanks to sound modulation therapy.
In therapy that uses headphones and smartphones, the person with tinnitus presses play on modified sounds engineered to affect the “synchronised neural activity” associated with the condition.
DJ Mag reports that within the trial, which was partially funded by the UK’s charity for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, RNID, 77 participants were split into real and placebo groups.
Participants have been in the trial for 1 hour a day over 6 weeks. They then listened to musical notes that had been altered for six weeks, followed by a three-week holiday from the trial. For another six weeks, participants switched treatment groups.
Consultant neurologist and Newcastle University researcher Dr Will Sedley told the BBC that, on average, participants who listened to the “active” sounds, not the placebo ones, did experience a “significant quieting” of their tinnitus symptoms – up to 10%.
Sedley added that the trial was conducted with subtly modified musical notes “so that the neurons that respond to sound pitches or frequencies near the tinnitus” were activated at “slightly different times,” rather than all at once.
“If we could build this into the normal, listening to music and talk radio, podcasts, [which] people are doing anyway, they could rack up hours and hours of listening every day,” Sedley continued.
“So, the hope is, even if we can’t cure tinnitus, that we might find something that makes it quieter for a fair number of people living with it just by doing the things they would already be doing in their lives.”
You can read the research at Science Direct.
Sound Fair notes that approximately one in three Australians has experienced “some degree of tinnitus” at some point in their lives, while about one in six live with “constant” tinnitus. Approximately 2% of Australians – or 500,000 people – find the condition “very distressing.”
Typical treatments include hearing aids, physiotherapy, and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), depending on one’s symptoms.
