Posted on 12/11/2024 9:18:50 PM PST by Red Badger
Around 15 percent of the world's population suffers from tinnitus, a condition which causes someone to hear a sound (such as ringing or buzzing) without any external source. It's often associated with hearing loss.
Not only can the condition be annoying for sufferers, it can also have a serious effect on mental health, often causing stress or depression. This is especially the case for patients suffering from tinnitus over months or years.
There's currently no cure for tinnitus. So finding a way to better manage or treat it could help many millions of people worldwide.
And one area of research that may help us better understand tinnitus is sleep. There are many reasons for this.
First, tinnitus is a phantom percept. This is when our brain activity makes us see, hear or smell things that aren't there. Most people only experience phantom perceptions when they're asleep. But for people with tinnitus, they hear phantom sounds while they're awake.
The second reason is because tinnitus alters brain activity, with certain areas of the brain (such as those involved in hearing) potentially being more active than they should be. This may also explain how phantom percepts happen. When we sleep, activity in these same brain areas also changes.
Our recent research review has identified a couple of brain mechanisms that underlie both tinnitus and sleep. Better understanding these mechanisms – and the way the two are connected – could one day help us find ways of managing and treating tinnitus.
Sleep and tinnitus
When we fall asleep, our body experiences multiple stages of sleep. One of the most important stages of sleep is slow-wave sleep (also known as deep sleep), which is thought to be the most restful stage of sleep.
During slow-wave sleep, brain activity moves in distinctive "waves" through the different areas of the brain, activating large areas together (such as those involved with memory and processing sounds) before moving on to others.
It's thought that slow-wave sleep allows the brain's neurons (specialized brain cells which send and receive information) to recover from daily wear and tear, while also helping sleep make us feel rested. It's also thought to be important for our memory.
Not every area of the brain experiences the same amount of slow-wave activity. It's most pronounced in areas we use most while awake, such as those important for motor function and sight.
But sometimes, certain brain areas can be overactive during slow-wave sleep. This is what happens in sleep disorders such as sleep walking.
A similar thing may happen in people with tinnitus. We think that hyperactive brain regions might stay awake in the otherwise sleeping brain. This would explain why many people with tinnitus experience disturbed sleep and night terrors more often than people who don't have tinnitus.
Tinnitus patients also spend more time in light sleep. Simply put, we believe that tinnitus keeps the brain from producing the slow-wave activity needed to have a deep sleep, resulting in light and interrupted sleep.
But even though tinnitus patients have less deep sleep on average than people without tinnitus, the research we looked at in our review suggests that some deep sleep is hardly affected by tinnitus. This may be because the brain activity that happens during the deepest sleep actually suppresses tinnitus.
There are a couple of ways the brain may be able to suppress tinnitus during deep sleep. The first has to do with the brain's neurons. After a long period of wakefulness neurons in the brain are thought to switch into slow-wave activity mode to recover. The more neurons in this mode together, the stronger the drive is for the rest of the brain to join.
We know that the drive for sleep can get strong enough that neurons in the brain will eventually go into slow-wave activity mode. And since this especially applies to brain regions overactive during wakefulness, we think that tinnitus might be suppressed as a result of that.
Slow-wave activity has also been shown to interfere with the communication between brain areas. During deepest sleep, when slow-wave activity is strongest, this may keep hyperactive regions from disturbing other brain areas and from interrupting sleep.
This would explain why people with tinnitus can still enter deep sleep, and why tinnitus may be suppressed during that time.
Sleep is also important for strengthening our memory, by helping to drive changes in connections between neurons in the brain. We believe that changes in brain connectivity during sleep are contributing to what makes tinnitus last for a long time after an initial trigger (such as hearing loss).
Treating tinnitus
We already know that intensity of tinnitus can change throughout a given day. Investigating how tinnitus changes during sleep could give us a direct handle on what the brain does to cause fluctuations in tinnitus intensity.
It also means that we may be able to manipulate sleep to improve the wellbeing of patients – and possibly develop new treatments for tinnitus.
For example, sleep disruptions can be reduced and slow-wave activity can be boosted through sleep restriction paradigms, where patients are told to only go to bed when they're actually tired. Boosting the intensity of sleep could help us better see the effect sleep has on tinnitus.
While we suspect that deep sleep is the most likely to affect tinnitus, there are many other stages of sleep that happen (such as rapid eye movement, or REM sleep) – each with unique patterns of brain activity.
In future research, both the sleep stage and tinnitus activity in the brain could be tracked at the same time by recording brain activity. This may help to find out more about the link between tinnitus and sleep and understand how tinnitus may be alleviated by natural brain activity.
Linus Milinski, Doctoral Researcher in Neuroscience, University of Oxford; Fernando Nodal, Departmental Lecturer, Auditory Neuroscience Group, University of Oxford; Victoria Bajo Lorenzana, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, University of Oxford, and Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, Professor of Sleep Physiology, University of Oxford.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
An earlier version of this article was published in May 2022.
A few years ago, my doctor changed my BP medication because my old one didn’t work anymore.
When I took the new medication the next morning, my usual time, my tinnitus almost went completely away for a few minutes, but gradually came back.............
Hair?
I wish I had some!..................😁
My hairline receded years ago and most of the top of my head is devoid of follicles, while the surrounding areas are still producing. I guess I'm developing what's called "Male Pattern Baldness". It makes for a terrible time trying not to look like I'm wearing a large fuzzy donut.
Hair is over-rated.
Bookmark
I have PULSATILE TINNITUS from a head injury almost 20 years ago.
I have heard and will hear every mother loving #### ####ing heartbeat I have until I die.
It’s great :)
it’s got nothing to do with an artery problem or anything...been tested..just brain damage.
And swirling wind in my air when I am too active..
Sleep DOES get rid of the out of control noises (besides the pulsing heart).
So they may be on to something.
I would wish pulsatile tinnitus on soros, biden, obama and hillary :)
Maybe a few others but that’s it :)
Bump for reference.
A 2016 thread on tinnitus: https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3501577/posts
My grandmother complained about tinnitus.
If I recall she fought a Gorn once.
CPAP machine can fix apnea.
Hasn’t fixed my tinnitus.
I’ve had tinnitus for many years. When I first noticed it, I thought a car in the distance had a broken horn that wouldn’t stop. Eventually I realized it was me. I have it now. At times I may even get a musical tone that is so intense I can physically feel it. Gradually, it fades away. I’m so used to it all now, I don’t usually notice it unless it’s really quiet, like right now.
From that thread......
Tinnitus finger drumming cure. It’s about a third of the way down, a brief video.
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/finger-drumming-technique-reddit-cure.5730/
It’s supposed to help. Some people say it does. Other say it doesn’t.
describing mine... picture a wedding car and instead of dragging cans, there are dragging different size wrenches and someone is randomly turning the volume of the clinking wrenches on and off...
It could even be the interchangeable size ear pieces are the wrong size- I had to try the different one that came with the aids to find ones that wouldn’t feed back.
Usually mine is just millions of crickets.
But every now and then it will become GREGORIAN CHANTS!...............
I got tinnitus from allopurinol....my doctor got it from Levaquin or cipro...at least tinnitus due to drugs can go away..salicylates at high does can cause reversible tinnitus and even worse side effects .quinine is a well known culprit also and even worse side effects than just tinnitus
My heart goes out to every person experiencing/suffering from tinnitus...may the boffins find a way to eliminate it.
A few weeks ago I was home alone and the house was absolutely silent, my ears were ringing slightly but there was also a rhythm that I could not figure out what it was and then I figured out what that rhythmic pattern was that I was hearing along with the ringing that was has become ever present. It was my blood flowing through the capillaries in my ears. I placed my fingers on my carotid artery and it was my heartbeat that I was hearing as the blood rushed through the capillaries in my head.
lol...👍
ping.
Lucky! I wish mine were Gregorian Chants!🙂👍
My tinnitus began in my early sixties as hearing in one ear deteriorated. Now at 69, it is a tad worse. Unfortunately, no kind of masking sounds drowns it out. I’m less aware of it during the day, but it’s always there. ENT shrugs and says sorry, but that’s life, no cure. Fortunately, I’m adapting and it’s not driving me crazy, it’s just the new normal.
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