Have you ever dealt with that constant ringing in your ears that just won't seem to go away? You are not alone, according to researchers one in every five people is affected with the problem. The medical condition, known as Tinnitus, causes patients to hear a constant ringing in their ears. However, researchers have now discovered that tinnitus varies greatly from person to person and in some cases the ringing may not actually be there at all.
The condition itself may actually arise from a number of other injuries or diseases. In a study by researchers from the University Iowa and published in the magazine "Current Biology," scientists monitored the brain of patients by using a technique that mapped their brain's activities.
This technique is commonly used to treat epilepsy, but researchers wanted to study the effects on the brain that occurs when tinnitus occurs. When those without tinnitus were played this sound, the activity within the brain was restricted to an extremely small area. However, when brain activity of those suffering from tinnitus was scanned, an extremely larger and more complex area of activity was recorded. This indicates to researchers as to why it has proven difficult or even impossible to effectively treat the condition.
The intensity of the ringing could be so strong that the effect is debilitating for patients making it important making this a potentially important discovery that could one day improve their condition. Currently, this is not the be all end all discovery that brings people suffering from tinnitus any closer to a cure, it does pave the way for the development of more effective treatment methods in the future.
"This has profound implications for the understanding and treatment of tinnitus, as we now know it is not encoded like normal sound, and may not be treatable by just targeting a localized part of the hearing system," wrote Phillip Gander, a co-author of the study and researcher at the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Iowa.
"Perhaps the most remarkable finding was that activity directly linked to tinnitus was very extensive and spanned a large proportion of the part of the brain we measured from," commented Will Sedley, researcher at the University of Newcastle, UK and the study's lead.
"In contrast, the brain responses to a sound we played that mimicked tinnitus were localized to just a tiny area."
