What is tinnitus?
Tinnitus is defined as an individual having the perception of sound in their ears or head without that sound having an external source. This means that the sound is subjective and only they can hear it. Affecting about 1 in 6 Australians, constant tinnitus can have a serious impact on people’s lives causing anxiety, depression, poor focus and sleep problems. It can occur in 1 or both ears, be constant or variable, and vary in pitch or intensity. Commonly described as a ringing in the ears, it can also present as whooshing, crickets, humming, roaring, clicking or heartbeats (pulsatile).
What causes tinnitus?
The exact cause of tinnitus remains unknown in the medical world. The common understanding is that noises are generated from the brain following some spontaneous change within the auditory system. Tinnitus is not a disease, but rather a symptom of an underlying condition affecting the aural system.
Conditions known to cause or exacerbate tinnitus include:
- Hearing loss
- Ear trauma or pathology
- Circulatory system disorders
- Jaw and neck problems
- Some medications
- Stress
- Exposure to loud noise
- Meniere’s Disease
- Smoking
- Diet
How can we help?
Given that the cause mechanism behind tinnitus remains unknown, there is no explicit cure for the condition. Treatments which focus on the underlying conditions, however, can reduce the symptoms and severity of one’s tinnitus.
This is where we can help.
We aren’t here to promise you a miracle, but throughout our careers as audiologists we have each had many successful tinnitus patient outcomes. By far the most common reason someone is perceiving tinnitus is untreated hearing loss. In fact, up to 90% of tinnitus sufferers have hearing loss. It should not come as a surprise then that treating your hearing loss by wearing hearing aids will in most cases reduce the severity of tinnitus.
Hearing aids act on tinnitus in 2 ways. Firstly, by increasing the prominence of environmental noise a person’s brain can more easily shift its attention away from the tinnitus. If your world is quiet (with untreated hearing loss) your brain’s attention will latch on to the annoying tinnitus noise. The other way hearing aids assist is by filling in the sound gaps the brain is missing. This acts to retrain the brain over time to focus on other sounds, dampening or switching off the manifested sound in approximately 50% of cases.
For those people where the above treatment does not have an impact on their symptoms, tinnitus masking therapy can be introduced. These days, it is commonplace for hearing aid manufacturers to include sophisticated inbuilt tinnitus masking features into many of their products. Your audiologist can work with you to customise a masking noise style, pitch, tempo and volume that plays through your hearing aids to “cover up” the tinnitus. The ideal setting is where the masking noise is present at a volume just below the tinnitus but the severity of it is reduced. Over time, the masking noise will be reduced by a fraction each visit with the resulting theory of the brain no longer perceiving the tinnitus as a threat.