I can’t remember exactly when the volume turned up on the faint ringing that I’d long had in my ears, but the sound, recently diagnosed as tinnitus, now ‘sings’ loudly in my head from the moment I wake up. If I don’t switch something noisy on pretty quickly – the radio, the TV, a podcast – the ringing soon becomes irritating, even distracting. According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), one in seven adults in the UK has tinnitus , which is a persistent sound in the ears like ringing or buzzing.
In some cases, this nagging noise can lead to serious anxiety and stress, even depression and sleeplessness. Cases of tinnitus have shot up by 50 per cent in 15 years in the UK according to Tinnitus UK. “Our auditory systems basically become noisier as we go through life, as our hearing deteriorates,” says Mark Williams, chief Audiologist at The Tinnitus Clinic.
But while it is often linked to hearing loss and other hearing-related conditions, especially in the over-60s, some people with tinnitus do not have hearing loss, and many people with hearing loss don’t have tinnitus. In my case, a recent hearing test showed I’m still within the ‘normal hearing’ bracket. But as it dawns on me that this intermittent ringing sound is not going to miraculously disappear, I start looking for a culprit.
Was it all the gigs and nightclubs I went to in my younger days, emerging hours later unable to hear properly for a day or two? I was hardly careful to.
