This is a Discovery Research Grant awarded to Professor Fatima Husain at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. It started in August 2025.
Background
Tinnitus affects over 740 million adults worldwide, approximately 1 in 7 adults; in the UK alone, over 7 million adults have tinnitus. It is also a particular problem for people serving in the military, given their increased exposure to loud noises like gunshots or explosions and their increased likelihood of sustaining head injuries.
Most people with tinnitus are not bothered by it, but around 1 in 5 experience distress because of their tinnitus, which can lead to depression, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, irritability, and problems with concentration.
There are no treatments that can silence tinnitus, but there are ways that can help manage the symptoms for some people, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy. However, there is a lack of research into whether measurable factors, such as demographic, psychological, cognitive, and/or sensory factors, could help predict how well someone will respond to specific tinnitus treatments.
Aim
In this project, Professor Husain will lead a team to investigate whether training people with tinnitus to intentionally control specific aspects of their brain activity (which are linked to tinnitus) can reduce the distress they experience.
To do this, the researchers will use a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to provide their volunteers with information about their brain activity, a process known as neurofeedback.
Volunteers will take part in both training and feedback sessions. In training blocks, the volunteers will practice controlling specific aspects of their brain activity linked to tinnitus using any strategy they deem effective.
During feedback blocks, the researchers will measure changes in how different parts of the brain interacted with each other during practice, with a focus on parts of the brain associated with tinnitus. They will then report these measurements back to the volunteer through a display screen in real time. Using this feedback, the volunteer can either try to change their strategy to a more effective one or retain an existing good strategy in subsequent training blocks.
This way, through repeated cycles of training and feedback, volunteers will learn to gain intentional control of aspects of their brain activity, which will hopefully reduce the distress associated with their tinnitus.
Benefit
Similar fMRI feedback-training methods have been effective in treating conditions like depression, trauma (PTSD) and schizophrenia. The results from this project will tell us whether we can treat tinnitus in a similar way, by teaching people with tinnitus to intentionally control specific aspects of their brain activity through neurofeedback.
Such a guided treatment has the potential to help people with distressing tinnitus who do not respond to other treatment approaches. In the long-term, it will also allow researchers to identify people with different ‘subtypes’ of tinnitus based on their neurofeedback response profiles, leading to the ability to develop personalised treatment plans for people with distressing tinnitus.