People who suffer from tinnitus hear a continuous noise in their head. The condition can have various causes. Long-term or regular exposure to loud noises is often cited as the main cause. However, tinnitus can also be caused by overactive brain cells and nerve cells that provide hearing. Other possible causes include abnormalities in blood vessels, ossicles or the inner ear.
Treating Tinnitus with App
The treatment developed and tested in New Zealand, called digital polytherapeutic, is based on a combination of a number of digital tools. Before treatment, the patient is tested by an audiologist. This determines the degree, severity and type of the tinnitus complaints. Based on that, he creates a white noise-based treatment plan. Treatment consists of a combination of goal-oriented counseling, goal-oriented games and other technology-based therapies that are followed via the smartphone app.
The app was compared in a clinical trial with a white noise-based self-help app for the smartphone. The 31 patients treated with the new app already reported a significant clinical improvement in complaints after 12 weeks. This was not the case for the 30 patients who had used the self-help app.
“What this therapy does is essentially rewire the brain in a way that reduces the sound of the tinnitus to a background noise that has no meaning or relevance to the listener,” said Professor Grant Searchfield, an audiologist and one of the developers of the new therapy.
Roll out within six months?
In practice, there is currently no treatment that can cure tinnitus. There are, also in the Netherlands, therapies that can reduce the symptoms of tinnitus. This happens, for example, at Adelante in South Limburg. There, in collaboration with Maastricht University, Meen has developed specialized treatment for a tiered treatment of tinnitus, of which cognitive behavioral therapy is the core. Research has shown that this treatment leads to a reduction in complaints and an improvement in quality of life in many patients.
If the therapy developed in New Zealand with a smartphone app proves successful, and they are well on their way, that would be a breakthrough. Before that happens, the app still needs to be further developed and tested more extensively, clinically and internationally. Nevertheless, the initiators expect that the digital polytherapeutic therapy and app will hopefully become widely available within six months.