Many MindedHigher blood levels of a hearing protein tied to tinnitus in small study
A study in the journal Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery proposes a candidate blood marker for tinnitus: prestin, a motor protein in the membranes of the outer hair cells lining the cochlea. Prestin helps amplify sound and is important for sensitive hearing. The study enrolled 82 adults, about half of whom had tinnitus. Those with tinnitus had blood prestin concentrations roughly 50 percent higher than those without. The work builds on an earlier study by some of the same researchers, including Kourosh Parham, an otolaryngologist at the University of Connecticut.
The context is a long-standing gap. Tinnitus is estimated to affect 15 percent of people worldwide, yet diagnosis has depended on patients reporting sounds that are not there, because no objective test exists. Earlier research has shown prestin levels shift with noise exposure, age, hearing loss and cochlear trauma. Aspirin overdose is also known to disrupt cochlear function, with prestin among the affected proteins.
For health, the value is in what an objective measure could eventually allow: a condition now judged only by self-report could be measured, tracked and used to test treatments. That would make research cheaper to run and, in time, care easier to reach. Parham describes the result as a first step toward drugs that help manage tinnitus.
The caveats are large. This is a small observational study and does not show that high prestin causes tinnitus. A separate diagnostic accuracy analysis found the marker cannot yet reliably diagnose tinnitus in this sample. Some participants may have had non-cochlear tinnitus unrelated to prestin, which could have blurred the results. Other factors likely contribute, and the cause of tinnitus is still unknown. Watch for larger studies that separate tinnitus types. The University of Basel, listed as the actor, is not mentioned in the source text we worked from.
Source: ScienceAlert