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When the house it subsides in the dead of night, or after the children go to school in the morning, I hear a loud, occasionally flickering sound. If I focus on it, the noise gets louder and can even keep me awake. At first I suspected that the culprit was the gadget in my house – maybe a faulty power adapter. But after no one else could hear it, and then I consulted my doctor, I realized that the ringing in my ears was tinnitus.
“It’s a phantom sound generated by the brain,” said Julie Prutsman, a respected audiologist and founder of the Sound Hearing Center. “Many people perceive it at ear level. They will say “my ears are ringing”. But when you try to measure it in a person’s ear, there is no signal.
Tinnitus (correctly pronounced ti-nuh-tuhs or ti-night-us, although Prutsman prefers the former) is a very common condition. The National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 10 percent of the U.S. adult population has had tinnitus lasting at least five minutes in 2020. Most tinnitus cases occur with major hearing loss and greater some sufferers experience it as ringing, buzzing, or hissing, but it may even sound like music or singing.
What causes tinnitus?
Noise exposure is the number one cause of tinnitus, so it’s no surprise that servicemen and musicians are often affected. The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that almost half of people aged 12 to 35 are at risk of hearing loss due to prolonged and excessive exposure to loud noises from personal audio devices and other sources.
“Exposure to loud noise leads to changes in the inner ear, auditory nerve or synapses in the brain,” says Prutsman. “But there are other things that can also cause tinnitus, including accumulation of mud in the ears, head injuries, hereditary factors and other health changes.”
Researchers thought that tinnitus was a sound coming from hair cells in the inner ear, but this turned out to be incorrect. They also suspected the auditory nerve, but found that when you cut or cut the nerve, the tinnitus became louder, not softer.
My tinnitus is noticeably worse when I feel stressed or tired, and Prutsman says these are common triggers. Anxiety and depression are also associated with the condition and may even be a side effect of some medications, including antibiotics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and chemotherapy drugs.
Dealing with tinnitus
For most people, tinnitus is short-lived and will not require treatment. If it is persistent and persistent, lasting more than a few days, it is good to seek advice and help from a medical professional. It is often said that there is no cure for tinnitus, but it is more accurate to say that there is no cure for everyone. Research shows that there are many effective ways to manage symptoms and reduce the impact on your life.
“Avoid silence and be in an environment rich in sound,” says Prutsman. “Many people think that masking would be the right approach to cover up tinnitus with a louder sound, but my experience is that you just have to keep doing this level of masking louder and louder. Low-pitched sound is more soothing and soothing and can be mixed with tinnitus to distract the brain. “
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