Tinnitus can occur after an injury, damage or trauma to the head and sometimes emerges as a symptom that seems unrelated to a previous injury – like surgery, concussion or a neck injury that isn’t immediately or obviously linked to your hearing.
Also called post-traumatic tinnitus or trauma-associated tinnitus, this issue usually presents as a sound within one or both ears that only you can hear. It could sound like humming or ringing and be continuous or intermittent.
In this article, we’ll clarify why some people develop tinnitus after a head injury, the differences in symptoms between clients, and how to manage and treat post-traumatic tinnitus and protect your long-term hearing health.
Key Takeaways:
- Tinnitus can be stimulated by an injury or damage to the head, even if the trauma or surgery isn’t directly connected to your hearing function or ears.
- The symptoms of post-traumatic tinnitus are similar to those of tinnitus caused by any other factor and range in tone, frequency, intensity, and pitch.
- Finding the right treatment plan is key to reducing the impacts tinnitus has on your hearing, relaxation and sleep, depending on the nature and timing of the injury that has led to your symptoms developing.
Understanding Why Tinnitus Can Develop After a Head Injury
A significant proportion of people who suffer a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, go on to develop tinnitus symptoms, where sounds are generated from inside their ears.
Those noises could be characterised as hissing, buzzing, pulsing, static, or whooshing and can impact people very differently depending on their regularity and intensity.
However, tinnitus can also occur following other types of injury and might develop with or without simultaneous hearing loss or changes to your hearing. Incidents that can contribute to tinnitus might include:
- Falls where a person bangs their head
- Whiplash, most common after a collision
- Exposure to blasts, impacting members of the military or demolition professionals
- Concussion, even if the concussion was mild
- Surgeries, including routine treatments
Each of these scenarios can cause varying degrees of damage to the neck or skull. Although many clients haven’t connected an injury to their tinnitus, this happens because any trauma to the bones and blood vessels that help our ears function can develop into tinnitus.
Is Tinnitus After a Head Injury Temporary?
Some cases of post-traumatic tinnitus resolve naturally, where the underlying injury or accident is less serious or has caused temporary problems impacting the health of your ears.
Head traumas can, for instance, cause short-term tinnitus if the auditory nerves or inner ear have suffered a minor injury that will heal.
However, it is essential to have your tinnitus and ears assessed since leaving tinnitus untreated, especially after a TBI, can lead to further complications, such as headaches, stress, depression, fatigue, and hyperacusis—a sensitivity to even everyday, low-level noises.
Head injury clients with tinnitus may not have any other symptoms, but common side effects alongside tinnitus can include:
- Pressure within the ears
- Soreness or pain
Understanding the factors causing your tinnitus is essential because this may determine the most appropriate treatment solutions.
For example, tinnitus linked to damage to the bones within your ear may be somatic, whereas subjective tinnitus is more closely connected to exposure to excessive noises.
Neurological tinnitus, in contrast, happens when the nerve pathways that interpret sounds become damaged, and objective tinnitus is caused by muscle spasms and other issues.
Potential Causes of Tinnitus Developing Following a Head Injury
There are so many possible injuries and traumas that can negatively affect hearing or prompt tinnitus to develop, but we’ve summarised some of the more frequent occurrences:
- Damage to the alignment of the small bones in your middle ear called the ossicular chain.
- Problems that affect the cartilage or muscles in your jaw since some of the ligaments in your lower jaw connect to your middle ear.
- Trauma to the delicate cochlea, most often because of more serious head injuries and concussions.
- Meniere’s disease, which can be an outcome of a head injury, causes pressure to build within your ears that can trigger imbalances, tinnitus and hearing loss.
- Damage to the tiny cells in your auditory nerve, also known as sensorineural hearing loss.
It is also possible that tinnitus isn’t directly caused by your injury but is connected to the medications prescribed following an accident or surgery.
Sometimes, people with an unknown sensitivity or reactivity to medications like aspirin, some types of antidepressants, or anti-anxiety medications can develop tinnitus.
What do our Audiologists say?
Treating Tinnitus That Develops After a Head Injury
The complexity of TBIs and other head, neck or jaw injuries, as well as the scope of the potential causes and reasons for tinnitus, mean the best treatment solutions and strategies will depend on a thorough evaluation of your ears and hearing.
For example, tinnitus caused by physical damage may need to be addressed with surgery. However, this is rare, and it is far more likely that a tailored series of tinnitus treatments will prove beneficial without further invasive medical interventions.
Because tinnitus is most often caused by changes to how our brains interpret and process sounds, conventional solutions used to treat other medical problems are widely ineffective. This is why innovative tinnitus therapies are so influential in the world of audiology.
Some practitioners may suggest sound masking, using white noise or a similar technique to distract the brain from the tinnitus symptoms. In contrast, others could recommend acupuncture, behavioural therapies, and meditation.
The viability of these options will, of course, depend on the causes behind your tinnitus and whether they result in any improvements.
Regain Hearing has developed a groundbreaking tinnitus treatment approach that may be suitable for post-traumatic tinnitus. For some clients, this results in immediate symptomatic relief after one session or even a complete elimination of their tinnitus symptoms.
To assess whether this solution is likely to work for you, we recommend booking a full hearing assessment with your nearest clinic. Our audiologists will start by discussing your medical history and symptoms and then investigate all possible causes to ensure we know why post-injury tinnitus has developed and the right approaches to bringing the symptoms under control.
