快猫短视频

听

A device that stimulates the tongue and ears could help reduce the severity of tinnitus, a hearing disorder where people perceive phantom noises such as ringing in their ears.

The device, developed by Irish firm Neuromod Devices Limited, includes headphones that play a sequence of tones and white noise into the wearer鈥檚 ears, as well as a small mouthpiece that simultaneously provides electrical stimulation to the tongue.

鈥淲e need more treatment options for tinnitus that can be conveniently used at home but can lead to long-lasting effects,鈥� says Hubert Lim at Neuromod Devices Limited.

Around 13 per cent of people in the UK live with persistent tinnitus and about 30 per cent of people will experience it at some point in their lives. Treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy and counselling are often used to help people manage tinnitus, but there is no cure.

Lim and his colleagues tested their device in a trial including 326 people with tinnitus. Over a 12-week period, three groups of participants were asked to use the device twice a day for 30 minutes at a time, with differing patterns of stimulation.

The researchers found that treatment with the device significantly reduced the severity of tinnitus symptoms for between 75 and 89 per cent of participants, with improvements persisting up to a year later.

鈥淚f you make the auditory brain more sensitive to many inputs and acoustic stimuli, then it becomes distracted away and less sensitive or aware of the tinnitus,鈥� says Lim. 鈥淭his is how we believe the treatment is working.鈥�

鈥淭he paper makes a huge contribution to the tinnitus literature, not only because it reports a marked benefit for patients who participated in the trial, but because this is the first device trial ever to demonstrate any positive effect and therefore paves the way for further research using this mode of treatment,鈥� says at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in the UK.

Lim says a second trial of the device is ongoing, and it will be important to separate the effects of the device from those that might have been observed anyway, says Phillips. 鈥淲e know that there is a strong placebo effect when assessing interventions for tinnitus,鈥� he says.