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What's that whistling noise I can hear?

What's that whistling noise I can hear?

Tinnitus occurs in response to noise, which can be constant or intermittent, and can be in both ears or just one. "It can be reversed, but the majority of people learn to live with it"

ELENA MARTÍN

Wednesday, 7 October 2020, 13:14

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You come home from the nightclub with a constant whistling sound in your ears; it is something that has probably happened to everyone at some time. It is due to an irritation of the nerve endings of the inner ear, caused by prolonged exposure to loud noise, and it normally disappears within a few hours. What some people find, though, is that they start to hear this noise and it is still there months later, with no apparent cause. If it happens to you, it's not because somebody is saying bad things about you, as old wives' tales would have us believe, because it is almost certainly due to tinnitus.

Alberto Martín, Madrid, 37

  • two real cases

  • Two years ago, before going to bed, I noticed a whistling in one ear as if I had just come back from a discotheque. I didnt take much notice because it had happened before and had always gone by the next morning, but this time that didnt happen. Since then I have had a constant whistling noise in both ears, especially the left one, and above all when everything around me is quiet.

  • I couldnt think what had set it off. I have always looked after my health, including my hearing. At first it was dramatic, because it completely changed my life. I couldnt sleep at night, sit in silence, listen to music, watch a film, or stop thinking about the whistling sound because I heard it all the time.

  • As a result my health suffered through the lack of sleep and the stress, and it affected my family and social relationships.

  • Since then I have seen all the specialists imaginable, from ear, nose and throat to neurologists, psychiatrists, maxillofacial and even an acupuncturist, who was the one that helped me most.

  • The treatment that I follow is a wide combination of therapies, including a change in my diet (no coffee, very little sugar or salt), change of habits (sleep hygiene, exercise, relaxation, avoiding loud noises), acupuncture, sound and psychological therapies, some nutritional supplements and medication. With all that I have managed to recover a certain normality and be less aware of the tinnitus.

Tinnitus occurs in response to noise, which can be constant or intermittent, and can be in both ears or just one. We hear it even though there is no exterior acoustic stimulus. It can take different forms: buzzing, ringing, whistling, clicking or hissing.

The volume of sound varies in each person and in some cases it can be so loud that it affects concentration or makes it difficult to hear anything else. In fact, in 70 per cent of cases tinnitus is accompanied by a loss of hearing and is one of the principal causes of deafness.

It is calculated that in Spain about seven per cent of the population suffers from tinnitus and, curiously, singers such as Phil Collins, Bob Dylan, Barbara Streisand and actors like Gerard Butler, Halle Berry and Robert Redford have undergone treatment for it.

Clinically, tinnitus is divided into two types. One occurs in response to real sounds that are produced elsewhere in the body (such as blood vessels, or small bones in the middle ear) and they can be detected by the sufferer and also by a doctor using a machine.

The others can only be heard by the patient and occur without any perceivable outside source or corporal activity.

Diagnosis and treatment

The causes are varied, from hearing loss due to age, exposure to continued loud noise or blockage by ear wax.

Raquel García, Madrid, 19

  • I started to have a whistling sound in the ears when I was 15, a couple of days after I had come back on a plane (there was a change in pressure that caused a barotrauma). I looked on the internet to see what might be happening to me and what I read really worried me. That night I couldnt sleep, but as I didnt want to worry my family I didnt say anything. Finally, in desperation, I just had to tell my parents.

  • They took me to an otologist, who prescribed tablets to help me sleep and told me that I should try not to take any notice of the noise, but I couldnt do that.

  • At that time I was suffering all the normal problems that teenagers have and I found it very hard to deal with the tinnitus. It was especially bad in quiet indoor places, especially before going to sleep or when I was studying, but finally there came a time when I got used to it and almost stopped noticing it. Unfortunately, during the lockdown it became very bad because I was shut indoors for so long, so I have started to go to a centre which specialises in tinnitus now. They give me psychological help and physiotherapy, because it turns out that the ear in which it is loudest (the left one) is on the side of my body which is most tense.

  • However, people need to know that despite the initial shock, having tinnitus isnt the end of the world. If you tackle it positively and you are well emotionally, you learn to live with it without it restricting your life.

"There are also some medications that cause ototoxicity (damage in the ear), such as aspirin, quinine and certain anti-depressants," said Francisco Lorenzo Molina, head of the Ear, Nose and Throat department at the Viamed-Virgen de la Paloma hospital in Madrid.

Other factors that can make tinnitus worse are depression, anxiety, stress, high cholesterol, diabetes and auto-immune illnesses, among others.

Diagnosis is carried out by an audiometry test, an acuphenometry (to determine the frequency and intensity of the tinnitus) and a magnetic resonance scan.

When it comes to treatment, this may be medical, if the tinnitus is a symptom of an undiagnosed condition; rehabilitation, using sound therapies with white noise; or through medication.

"Surgical treatments are still not well documented," said Dr Lorenzo.

Is there a cure for tinnitus, or not? "It is reversible, but what happens in 70 per cent of cases is that the patients learn to live with it without it affecting their everyday life," he said.

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