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Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

This is incredible news to me, as someone with horrible tinnitus, I'm choosing to take this to mean that some day we may even have a treatment. If I ever could hear the sound of absolute silence again, I think it would reduce me to tears for a while. Hearing a ringing sound everywhere you go isn't literal torture, but it's maybe just below it, and I've been living with it for the past decade thanks to poor choices in the military.

I recognize that they solved a completely different issue, by the way. But the fact that it's possible to do this means to me that a different treatment for tinnitus may some day also be.

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note - maybe for others suffering with it given your background but idk - I've had low-level tinnitus for ages, at some point it suddenly got really bad (hearing it over street traffic), turns out my ears were totally filled with wax which muffled sound and destroyed my SNR, therefore tinnitus

back to normal slight tinnitus once removed. very easy process.

This could lead a way to fix Tinnitus, there's many causes of Tinnitus but it's almost always thought to be trauma to the Cochlea organ / structure.

There's many cells involved in sensing and relaying signals to the brain, and are damaged by a growing list of things (Antibiotics, viral, Osteoporosis, lack of blood flow, Acoustic trauma, protein loss - long lived proteins in the Cochlea). Even our own immune system has the ability to damage the Cochlea.

There is actually limited recovery of the OHC's at least but lack of regeneration potential. If there's a path to regenerate, it could one day fix the underlying cause and with this news it seems we're closer than we ever have been.

What are the modern approaches used to try to lessen tinnitus?

I've seen stories about therapy targeting white or brown style noise at it, adjusting frequency until it has an affect. And that over time it can, for some people, reduce the tinnitus.

I tried one of those frequency adjustment videos where it just loops through a bunch of different frequencies to try to find the one that cancels out the ring of your tinnitus. I haven't found one that worked for me, really. But I should give that more time. Other than that, I'm not aware of any modern treatments for tinnitus.

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