To put it (very) simply, tinnitus is a permanent hearing condition that causes the patient affected by tinnitus to hear a constant noise in their ears. The noise can be anything. Some people hear a buzzing, some hear ringing, and some hear tea kettle sounds.
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It comes in various different forms for people who have it, and more than a third of the adult Canadian population have tinnitus — including me.
When I embarked on this project last year, I set out to research how the hearing condition was affecting the nation as a whole.
But through my research, I found that tinnitus affects people in the Northeastern Ontario region more because of the resource-based industries that dominate this area.
“I can tell you about how it affects people pretty much across all of Northeastern Ontario,” Kim Scott said. Scott is the executive director of the Sudbury branch for the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association.
“The rate of hearing loss and the rate of tinnitus is much higher here than it is in the rest of the province as a whole. Studies that we found through the Ontario Health Surveys have found that these numbers are consistently about 50 per cent higher in men and about 15 per cent higher for women as a whole compared to the rest of the province.
“We believe that this is mostly due to the natural resource-based industries of Northeastern Ontario. So, this could involve mining, logging and other resource-based industries. They’re very, very noisy industries that lead to noise induced hearing loss. And most people with noise induced hearing loss also acquire tinnitus.”
Tinnitus has multiple causes, a Sudbury audiologist explained.
“It could be due to just the natural aging process, or it could be noise induced,” Kelsey Bealieu, audiologist at the Sudbury Audiology Clinic, said.
“There's also the possibility that it's as simple as wax in the ear, it could be certain medication that's causing it. And what a lot of people don't know is that it could be muscle related. So if the person has a lot of neck tension, or any jaw problems at all, it could also cause tinnitus.”
With a long list of causes, symptoms and types of tinnitus, it might be a complex condition to properly understand. But Bealieu said the most common cause for tinnitus is hearing loss.
When someone experiences hearing loss, an audiogram can determine the frequency of where the hearing loss is. In my case, I have mild hearing loss in my left ear. When I did a hearing test with Beaulieu, she was able to show me that my left ear could hear sounds only to the extent of a frequency level of 800 hertz.
When I did my pitch-match test for my tinnitus, the frequency that matched the noise of my tinnitus the best was also at 800 hertz.
Beaulieu explained that when people experience hearing loss, the brain compensates for the loss of hearing by providing a sound in the ears that correlates best with the level of hearing loss.
What makes the condition commonly misunderstood is, perhaps, the invisible component of it. The only person who can assess tinnitus is the person who has it. It’s a constant noise that the patient hears and no one else can hear — and maybe that’s the most isolating part of it all.
In 2019, a Canadian Health Measures survey reported that 37 per cent of the adult Canadian population have tinnitus. And while most can live their lives unaffected by the condition, seven per cent of those with tinnitus are bothered by it — that’s 644,000 people. And 17 per cent of those who found it bothersome rated their mental health as poor or fair. That’s roughly 110,000 people who found their tinnitus was affecting their mental well-being.
So whether this story finds the 17 per cent of people mentally affected by tinnitus, or just one other person, this is a story for those who felt like the only people in the world struggling with this condition.
