Almost everyone has experienced tinnitus, at least briefly, at some point. The popping of fireworks or the slamming of a door and such like can bring on a brief “ringing in the ears.” But for about 10 percent of people in the UK, this condition is constant and difficult to live with. There is no cure, and current treatments are of varying effectiveness.
A New Hope For Tinnitus Relief
Happily, hope may be sauntering up the path. A group of audiology researchers in Oregon reported in a recent issue of JAMA/Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery that low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can alleviate symptoms by as much as 24 percent. They conducted their study at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Centre.
While “Transcranial” sounds like something related to vampires, the treatment actually involves sending magnetic waves into the brain. Why attack a hearing problem by working on the brain? In truth, your brain is your main hearing organ. Tinnitus usually arises from activity in the auditory cortex, the portion of the brain that receives and makes sense of signals from the ear.
These researchers noted older studies showing that tinnitus sufferers have increased brain wave activity in the auditory cortex. Other studies have revealed that low frequency rTMS can reduce neural activity in directly stimulated brain regions. So the Portland group wanted to see if applying rTMS to the auditory cortex would reduce tinnitus.
Non-Invasive, Painless Treatment
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is noninvasive, which mainly means it’s painless and no blood is spilled. They just place a specially-designed electromagnetic coil next to the patient’s scalp, from whence it delivers the magnetic pulses to the targeted region of the brain.
In the test, 64 participants were randomly divided into two equal groups—32 receive the rTMS treatment and 32 received a placebo from a machine identical in all visible ways to the one used for treatment, so they would not know they were in the control group. The test extended over 10 consecutive working days.
Improvement in 56% of Cases
Results showed that 56 percent of those receiving treatment saw improvement. The rate of tinnitus reduction for each person averaged 24 percent, with the greatest gain coming from those with the worst cases.
Curiously, 22 percent of those who did not receive treatment also improved, showing that the “placebo effect” is alive and well. Upon a 6-month followup, however, the treatment group had retained their gains whilst the placebo group had not.
This is not the first study done on the subject, but previous iterations had suffered from small sample sizes and improper placebo controls, according to the Portland researchers. This may account for the fact that some of the recommendations from Portland are at odds with some previous conclusions.
New Studies Needed
Even this study has its limits, say its authors, meaning it will still be a while before you can enjoy a treatment in the comfort of the audiology office. They recommend even larger sample sizes and variations in the number of treatments, the side of the head to which the coils are placed and other changes in order to ascertain the optimal treatment regimen.
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