Apple utilized the Research app on iOS to conduct its study on tinnitus.
Apple this week posted an update to its Newsroom site on an Apple Health Study examining tinnitus. University of Michigan researchers conducted the study, asking questions of more than 160,000 participants to characterize their lived experience with tinnitus.
According to Apple, the goal is to “improve understanding of tinnitus characteristics and inform future research on potential treatments.”
“Roughly 15 percent of our participants experience tinnitus daily,” Rick Neitzel, University of Michigan School of Public Health’s professor of environmental health sciences, said in a statement included in Apple’s update. “Tinnitus is something that can have a large impact on a person’s life. The trends that we’re learning through the Apple Hearing Study about people’s experience with tinnitus can help us better understand the groups most at risk, which can in turn help guide efforts to reduce the impacts associated with it. The Apple Hearing Study gives us an opportunity that was not possible before to improve our understanding of tinnitus across demographics, aiding current scientific knowledge that can ultimately improve management of tinnitus.”
Among the high-level takeaways of the study, it was reported 77.6% of participants have felt tinnitus in their life, with daily prevalence increasing with age. Moreover, people aged 55 and older were found to be three times as likely to cope with tinnitus on a daily basis compared to those in the 18–34 demographic. 2.7% more male participants reporting feeling tinnitus compared to females; 4.8% of males said they’ve never experienced tinnitus at all. The majority of people reported experiencing “brief” periods of tinnitus, while 14.7% said it felt “constant” to them.
Apple said its tinnitus study is one of three “landmark public health studies” conducted via the Research app on iPhone, released in 2019.
Researchers have accumulated “about 400 million hours of calculated environmental sound levels” to supplement the aforementioned lifestyle questionnaires in an effort to, Apple said, “analyze how sound exposure affects hearing, stress, and hearing-related aspects of health.” The data gathered through the study will be shared with the World Health Organization as a contribution to its Make Listening Safe initiative.
The Apple Hearing Study’s news is coincidentally timely. Earlier this month, I published an interview with audiologist Dr. Marc Fagelson, a tinnitus expert who sits on the scientific advisory committee at the American Tinnitus Association and who runs a tinnitus clinic at the Mountain Home VA Medical Center in Jackson City, Tennessee. Dr. Fagelson has spent much of his adult life studying tinnitus, emphasizing that while the condition is annoying and disabling to varying extents, it isn’t medically harmful. In contrast to the Apple study—in which less than 2.1% tried using behavior modification and cognitive therapy to alleviate tinnitus symptoms—Dr. Fagelson expressed his opinion that a behavioral approach is most effective because doctors cannot cure tinnitus and, again, the effects are relatively benign. Dr. Fagelson and his team strive to provide patients with the most information they can muster in an effort to “adjust their thinking and behaviors regarding tinnitus in order to live a life less disturbed or bothered by it.”
As this study was sponsored by Apple, of course the company used the opportunity to share best practices for how its products can help better manage one’s hearing health. Apple recommends people make use of the Noise app on watchOS, as well as the Active Noise Cancellation and Loud Sound Reduction modes on the second-generation AirPods Pro.