Is sleep the key to a tinnitus cure? – Healthy Hearing

Do you ever wake up during the night to phantom ringing, buzzing or other sounds only you can hear? This is known as tinnitus, and it’s a common reason for sleep problems.

Earlier this year, a team at the University of Oxford proposed why this happens, a perspective that they say could lead to better treatment for tinnitus, which researchers estimate affects as many as 1 out of 5 adults and in some cases is highly stressful.

Tinnitus can wake you up, but why?</h2…….

Do you ever wake up during the night to phantom ringing, buzzing or other sounds only you can hear? This is known as tinnitus, and it’s a common reason for sleep problems.

Tinnitus can wake you up, but why?

Tinnitus can prevent deeper stages of
sleep.

The Oxford team synthesized existing research to propose a new paradigm for tinnitus that interrupts sleep.

First, a little background: When you fall asleep, your brain blocks out external stimuli to a great extent—which is how you can fall asleep with the TV on, for example. But how this happens is not well understood, the Oxford team points out, nor do we know much about how sleep changes responses to internal stimuli like tinnitus or pain.

As you sleep, you cycle between five stages of brain function several times. The non-dreaming stages account for about three-quarters of your total sleep time. In those periods, the brain produces different types of wave activity that slowly spread back and forth across the brain.

At first, that wave activity may suppress the brain signals that create ringing in the ears. But when the wave is less intense, tinnitus signals may surge, either awakening you or preventing more deep sleep, the Oxford team proposed.

Tinnitus may trigger wakefulness in the sleeping brain

The interaction creates “local wakefulness in the sleeping brain,” preventing you from moving on to the dreaming stage, called REM (“rapid eye movement”) sleep. It’s worth noting that night terrors, which are linked to tinnitus in adults, also occur at this transition point.

“Sleep is ultimately linked to how tinnitus develops over time,” co-author Associate Professor Victoria Bajo Lorenzana explained in an Oxford news release. “These findings will help researchers to identify a time window where delivering a treatment for tinnitus will be most effective before it develops into a permanent condition. The findings also may provide information about how tinnitus affects sleep quality. This could lead to a new line of research looking at whether sleep could help to correct the abnormal brain activity that is linked to tinnitus.”

For more details, see an outline of the argument in this video and this article in The Conversation.