Research conducted at Oxford’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute has uncovered a previously unexplored connection between tinnitus and sleep. Neuroscientist Linus Milinski and colleagues identified remarkable parallels between tinnitus, a debilitating condition affecting about 15 percent of the world’s population, and sleep, suggesting both may rely on spontaneous brain activity.
Tinnitus is a phantom percept—a condition where the brain creates a subjective sound experience that no one else can hear. The sound may manifest as ringing, hissing, buzzing, or clicking and may be constant or intermittent. Research on ferrets exposed to noise found that those developing tinnitus showed overly responsive brain activity to sound. Crucially, when these animals entered non-REM sleep, that hyperactivity was dampened, suggesting that sleep may temporarily mask tinnitus effects by engaging the same brain circuits.
According to Milinski, the research team could observe sleep problems appearing simultaneously with tinnitus following noise exposure. “This suggested, for the first time, a clear link between developing tinnitus and disrupted sleep,” he explained. The findings indicate that deep sleep may help mitigate tinnitus by engaging natural brain mechanisms for modulating abnormal activity.
Research from China found that individuals with tinnitus showed reduced ability to suppress the hyperactivity of their awake brains as they transitioned into sleep. Milinski noted that tinnitus can worsen sleep, and poor sleep may in turn worsen tinnitus, creating a potentially vicious cycle. When people do not sleep well, they become more vulnerable to stress, which Milinski identified as one of the strongest factors known to worsen tinnitus and can even trigger tinnitus to begin with. The expanding research field is investigating how sleep, environment, and tinnitus interact across multiple studies and populations beyond ferrets.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://us.headtopics.com/news/tinnitus-is-somehow-connected-to-a-crucial-bodily-function-80617203