Tinnitus afflicts millions, yet treatments that actually reduce the phantom sound, rather than helping people cope with it, have remained elusive. A Newcastle University study published in Hearing Research reports a step towards one. In a blinded, randomised trial run entirely online, 77 participants with chronic tinnitus used a novel sound therapy for an hour a day over six weeks, delivered through their own everyday devices.
The therapy applies a sound modulation technique designed to disrupt the patterns of neural activity in the brain's sound-processing regions that are thought to sustain tinnitus. On average, participants reported a reduction in tinnitus loudness of around 10 percent, with some achieving much larger benefits and others none. The quieting persisted for at least three weeks after treatment ended, while a placebo version of the therapy produced no effect.
Supported by RNID, the research has a distinctive practical edge: because the trial itself was delivered online, the therapy could in principle be distributed globally at minimal cost through smartphones and consumer audio devices. The team is now seeking funding for further trials to refine the approach, and independent experts note that larger clinical studies will be needed to validate the findings.