We’ve talked about tinnitus before. It’s my 10-year anniversary this month actually (yes I remember exactly when it started) and I know many of you deal with it too.
For something that is so common, it remains a pretty big mystery and not much has changed in the 10 years I’ve been searching the depths of the web on it. Doctors got nothing, except therapy to help us live with it. I don’t have good news, but I thought you should be aware of this study, which seems to be the largest ever undertaken.
In May, Apple and University of Michigan announced early findings from the Michigan Public Health Apple Hearing Study, a collaborative analysis of tinnitus information and assessments gathered from more than 160,000 participants. The study has no solutions as yet, but it’s a big data-finding effort, which seems to have never been done at this scale before. That seems strange for something that affects millions of people.
Still, we have to take comfort in the effort, since there must be data before there is investment. The study confirms the obvious (to us) citing “noise trauma”—exposure to high-decibel sounds—as the most frequent cause, coming in at 20.3 percent. The ever-handy “stress” was given as a response choice and cited by 7.7 percent of respondents. Mine started on a beach vacation, so go figure.
The study also looked at tinnitus volumes and how long people had dealt with it. Only 14.7 percent reported constant tinnitus, but that number went up as the age groups got older—35.8 percent of participants 55 and older experienced it all the time. Male respondents experienced tinnitus nearly 6.8 percent more often than females.
Most people cited the volume to be relatively faint (a scientific term); sadly 10 percent said it moderately or entirely interfered with their ability to hear clearly. Over a third of respondents (34.4 percent) reported it as noticeable, while 8.8 percent said their tinnitus was very loud or ultra loud.
But not everyone in the study had tinnitus—just 77.6 percent—and the older the participant, the more likely it was to be a daily thing. Respondents who were 55 or older were three times more likely to have daily tinnitus versus respondents between 18-34 years old.
As for trying to mitigate the effects, the largest number of respondents used noise machines (28 percent), 23.7 percent listen to nature sounds, and another 12.2 percent meditate. Interestingly, cognitive and behavioral therapy was a relatively unpopular tactic, with less than 2.1 percent exploring that option, maybe because therapy can be expensive. Personally, I use a homemade tone therapy, and try to avoid my obvious triggers like tea and chocolate. I wear earplugs when I drive and go to the beach since road noise and waves are also triggers.
As to methodology, the researchers had respondents answer a soundbased test on an iPhone app, asking users to match the type of sound they typically heard for the affliction. Most (78.5 percent) said it was a pure tone, while 17.4 percent reported hearing white noise. For those who heard a pure tone, 90.8 percent reported a pitch at 4 kHz or above, and additionally among them, 83.5 percent said their tinnitus was a single tone while 16.5 percent reported they heard “a teakettle tone”—a high-pitched, whistling sound.
The researchers collected an estimated 400 million hours of “calculated environmental sound levels” in the process of conducting the study, and plan to share data with the WHO. And so, we wait.
