In this project, Dr Sharon Curhan at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (USA), aims to understand more about the underlying biology of tinnitus.
Project start date: March 2021
Project end date: March 2023
About the project
A major challenge to understanding tinnitus and to finding effective treatments is that tinnitus is a complex condition with differing underlying causes and processes involved. People with tinnitus experience wide-ranging symptoms, including differences in what tinnitus ‘sounds’ like and how often it’s perceived.
People with tinnitus also differ with respect to many health, diet, lifestyle and environmental factors, such as the presence of hearing loss, health conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, their dietary and physical activity habits.
Although researchers have been working to discover effective ways to alleviate tinnitus, treatment options are limited and are not effective for everyone. People respond to the treatments that are available to differing degrees, and there’s no way to predict who is most likely to benefit.
In this project, Dr Curhan’s team aim to understand more about the underlying biology of tinnitus. These findings could help in the development of personalised treatment approaches for tinnitus, that consider each person’s individual characteristics, health, diet, lifestyle and environment.
How it works
The researchers will study patterns of ‘metabolites’, small molecules found in the blood that reflect a person’s metabolism (all the chemical reactions taking place inside the body) and try to identify a characteristic ‘metabolomic signature’ of tinnitus. They’ll then combine this tinnitus-related signature information with individual, lifestyle, and environmental data.
The researchers have access to 2 large cohorts of volunteers, the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II. Data from these volunteers include the metabolomic data described above, alongside information about each individual’s tinnitus, their hearing, genetics, health, diet, lifestyle and environmental factors.
Their goal is to identify the metabolic processes, genetic factors and environmental influences that differ between individuals who develop tinnitus and those who do not, to better understand the biology of tinnitus.
What have we learned so far?
This project has helped researchers take an important step towards finding objective biological markers for tinnitus.
Using blood samples from thousands of participants in the Nurses’ Health Studies, Dr Curhan’s team identified patterns of metabolites linked with persistent tinnitus, including some involved in lipid metabolism. These findings suggest that metabolomics could help reveal biological pathways involved in tinnitus and point to future ways to identify people at risk or develop more targeted treatments. More research is needed before this could lead to prevention or treatment options.
About the researcher
Dr Sharon Curhan is a physician and epidemiologist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She was awarded the RNID Discovery Research Grant in 2021.