A Pitt scientist is striving to quiet the ringing in veterans’ ears – University Times
You may have experienced it: You come home from a loud concert, and a faint ringing noise in your ears comes home with you. It probably faded after a few hours. But for more than 2 million U.S. veterans, the sound never goes away.
“There is something, a sound, that you keep hearing,” said Thanos Tzounopoulos, professor and vice chair of research in Pitt’s Department of Otolaryngology in the School of Medicine. “Only you can hear it, it doesn’t ex…….
You may have experienced it: You come home from a loud concert, and a faint ringing noise in your ears comes home with you. It probably faded after a few hours. But for more than 2 million U.S. veterans, the sound never goes away.
“There is something, a sound, that you keep hearing,” said Thanos Tzounopoulos, professor and vice chair of research in Pitt’s Department of Otolaryngology in the School of Medicine. “Only you can hear it, it doesn’t exist in the outside world.”
Tinnitus, hearing a persistent ringing, hissing or buzzing noise, is the most common service-related disability in U.S. veterans, who are exposed to a wide variety of loud noises that can trigger the disorder. Despite how widespread tinnitus is, there’s no FDA-approved cure — but Tzounopoulos is well on the way to changing that.
Part of why the search for a treatment has taken so long, Tzounopoulos said, is because for years scientists mistakenly thought the noises heard by those with tinnitus come from the ear.
“Tinnitus starts with the ear, but it’s the brain that maintains it,” said Tzounopoulos, who also directs the Pittsburgh Hearing Research Center. “It usually starts with some sort of hearing loss, and the brain is trying to compensate to deal with the new reality.”
Usually, the brain filters out signals that aren’t relevant. In 2011, Tzounopoulos found that tinnitus can occur when exposure to loud noises stops one of those filters from working. Another way of thinking about it is that your brain has built-in gates that only let in sounds from the outside, while keeping out noise that the brain itself generates. For those with tinnitus, the gatekeepers are off duty for good.
A 2013 Pitt Medcast episode described Tzounopoulos’ research as a “promising path,” and the eight years since have borne that prediction out. In 2015, Tzounopoulos partnered with Peter Wipf, a distinguished professor of chemistry in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, to begin developing drugs that could target the specific mechanism he identified as a trigger for tinnitus. “We’re trying to quiet down the first stop of the auditory nerve in the brain,” Tzounopoulos said.
The drug they’ve been focusing on, called RL-81, would be used soon after tinnitus develops, and recent research indicates it could remain effective much longer than they first expected. Their testing shows great promise in preventing mice from developing tinnitus after being exposed to loud noises. Since then, the group has …….
Source: https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/potential-pitt-cures-tinnitus
