New Treatment for Tinnitus Can Give Relief to Those Who Suffer From Ringing in the Ears

It’s not a cure, but a recently approved method using mild electrical pulses helps retrain the brain to ignore the phantom noise

Sari Harrar,

AARP

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En español

Published July 30, 2025

Twelve years ago, Clara Flores began hearing a constant buzzing in her ears. “It happened after I had a summer cold,” says Flores, now 48, a senior research project coordinator at Johns Hopkins University and mother of two who lives in Philadelphia.

“An ear, nose and throat doctor told me I had tinnitus along with some hearing loss, and that there was nothing he could do. I cried for two years, grieving that I would never hear silence again — like that moment of calm when your children fall asleep.”

Tinnitus is the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present. About 27 million Americans have it. The word derives from “tinnire,” the Latin word for “to ring,” but this common condition can also sound like phantom hissing, clicking, roaring, buzzing or pulsing.

Flores says her tinnitus sounds like the raspy hum of an old fluorescent light bulb. Adding to the annoyance: It has a higher pitch in one ear, a lower pitch in the other. “It was more obvious to me when I was tired, but it was always there,” she says. She lived with it for years. But while working part-time during the pandemic, she spent time online looking for treatment advances. “There had to be something out there,” she says. And there was. Flores found a new therapy with a tongue-twister of a name — bimodal neuromodulation — that was in clinical trials.

Researchers were having success giving the brain a one-two nudge by stimulating sensory and auditory nerves simultaneously, giving the brain practice at paying more attention to external sounds and less to the internal, phantom noise of tinnitus.

Several systems are currently in development. The one that caught Flores’ attention was Lenire, developed by Ireland-based Neuromod Devices.

It deploys two modes of stimulation simultaneously: mild electrical pulses to the tongue from a tiny plastic paddle held in the mouth, plus recorded sounds a user listens to through headphones. The goal is to retrain the brain to downplay tinnitus.

“When I heard there’s a way to change the routing in your brain, it made sense,” Flores says. She got on a waiting list with a local audiologist. Lenire got U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in March 2023. Flores gave it a try a few months later.

Phantom sounds

“What people with tinnitus hear is a very true, real sound. But it’s internally generated,” says audiologist Gail Brenner, of The Tinnitus Center in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, who prescribed and adjusted Flores’ Lenire device. “When there’s damage to the auditory nerve, there’s a reduction of external sound. The brain is looking for stimulation and can’t find it. So it creates its own sound.”

There’s no cure. But growing evidence traces tinnitus to damage to hair cells in the inner ear that send electrical signals to the brain or to the auditory nerve that relays the signals.

Ninety percent of people with tinnitus also have hearing loss, according to the American Tinnitus Association. Recent research suggests aging adds extra vulnerability for reasons experts don’t yet fully understand. Every 1 decibel of hearing loss increased tinnitus risk by 6 percent for older people, compared with 3 percent in young adults, according to an analysis of more than 18,000 people, published in BMC Medicine in 2023. Tinnitus affects 14 percent of midlife adults and 24 percent of people age 65 and older, compared with about 10 percent of young adults.

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Most of the time, it’s mild. But 3 percent of midlife adults and 7 percent of older adults report severe effects. Brenner says it can interfere with sleep, work, relationships, mental concentration and emotional health. “It can have debilitating effects,” she says. “Your brain and body can interpret tinnitus signals as a threat.”

Ross O’Neill, founder and CEO of Neuromod, says stress may fuel tinnitus. “It’s the fight-or-flight response,” he says. Your brain becomes frightened by the sound and becomes hypervigilant. Fear is heightened. “You pay more attention to the sound, [and] you hardwire the effect into your brain.”

Sometimes, treatable problems like earwax, fluid in your middle ear, temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ, a group of conditions causing pain in the jaw joint) or a benign tumor growing on the auditory nerve is the cause. For people with tinnitus and hearing loss, audiologists and ENTs may suggest hearing aids to make external sounds louder, so tinnitus becomes less noticeable.

“When there’s hearing loss and the brain is not getting enough input, the brain can perceive tinnitus as louder,” Brenner says. “So hearing aids can be very effective. But they’re not the complete answer. When you take them off, the tinnitus is just as bothersome as before.”

Brenner also often recommends patients try mind-body techniques like mindfulness meditation, stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy to minimize tinnitus by helping people react less to it. She also recommends tinnitus retraining therapy, which combines sound therapy with counseling to help people notice tinnitus less.

But when she first began hearing about bimodal neuromodulation research about eight years ago, she was intrigued. “We’re talking about changing brain maps, rewiring pathways to reduce tinnitus symptoms,” she says. She became one of the first U.S. audiologists trained to offer the treatment.

Courtesy of Neuromod Devices Ltd

What research says about the new tinnitus treatment

Studies show that bimodal neuromodulation can quiet the perception of tinnitus’s internal clamor. In a 2022 study of 191 people with mostly moderate to severe tinnitus, published in the journal Scientific Reports, 70 percent of those who used Lenire for an hour a day for 12 weeks reported a benefit.

A year later, they were still doing better than before treatment. Scores on two widely used questionnaires about tinnitus symptoms improved by a significant 17 to 20 points. There were no serious side effects, but some people reported jaw pain, tooth sensitivity and a change in their tinnitus sound.

Bimodal neuromodulation forces the brain to pay attention to other sounds, driving attention away from tinnitus. “It’s not a cure,” O'Neill says. It’s a treatment [that] reduces significant symptoms.”

The changes can be dramatic. In a 2025 study of 212 people who sought help for moderate to severe tinnitus at an audiology clinic in Alaska, 91.5 percent reported a significant improvement after using Lenire.

At the start, about half had severe to “catastrophic” tinnitus, which dropped to 11 percent after treatment. The other half started the study with moderate tinnitus, which fell to 22 percent.

By the end of the 12-week study, 66 percent rated their tinnitus as “mild” or “slight.” Four participants saw their tinnitus worsen with treatment. Most improved by using mind-body strategies, including counseling and breathing exercises, according to the study.

“I wasn’t surprised by these real-world study results,” says coauthor Hubert Lim, a professor of biomedical engineering and otolaryngology at the University of Minnesota. “They showed tinnitus patients get a significant additional benefit when sound therapy is simultaneously reinforced by stimulating the tongue. The tongue is a proven pathway to brain activation." Lim has been studying bimodal neurostimulation for 20 years; he is the chief scientific officer of Neuromod Devices and is an officer in two other start-ups.

Lenire is the only FDA-approved bimodal neuromodulation system available in the United States. But researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa and in Poland are testing systems that work in similar ways.

In a 2023 study in JAMA Network Open of 99 people with somatic tinnitus (a type triggered by body movements), a device developed at the University of Michigan made tinnitus sound significantly less loud for 65 percent of participants. The system sends mild electrical stimulation through the skin while users listen to sounds through headphones.

The American Tinnitus Association calls biomodal neuromodulation “one of the most promising and well-studied emerging therapies for tinnitus.”

“The benefit has been remarkable,” says Brenner. “I have fit more than 120 tinnitus patients with the Lenire device in less than two years. Their success rate is over 85 percent. It’s a game changer.”

Not everyone is a candidate — people with implanted medical devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators, those with reduced sensitivity of the tongue or tongue sores or irritation, or with medical conditions such as epilepsy or neuralgia (nerve-related pain) of the head and neck shouldn’t use it, according to the Lenire website. And so far, it’s unknown whether the results wear off and might require a refresher session.

The $4,000 device is covered by the Veterans Administration but not by private health insurance or Medicare, says O’Neill.

Hearing only birdsong

Every day in the fall and winter of 2023 to 2024, Flores slid Lenire’s small plastic paddle on to her tongue, put on headphones and switched on a controller smaller than a cellphone. The paddle emitted mild, slightly tickly electrical pulses. The headphones played a soothing soundscape, like a waterfall in a forest. “I would text my kids, ‘I’m zapping.’ They could not interrupt me,” she says.

By spring, her tinnitus “went from affecting 70 percent of my life to 5 percent,” she says. “I would catch myself listening for it and realize it wasn’t there. I’m not paying attention to it.”

On a trip to Peru in 2024, Flores heard a bird singing early one morning outside a hotel restaurant. “I just sat there listening to it,” she says. “I didn’t hear anything else. This treatment has brought a lot of peace, a lot of space in my brain for other things.”

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