They have difficulty sleeping, concentrating and maintaining employment. The stress of trying to manage relentless head noise can lead to bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide. According to the American Tinnitus Association, about 50 million Americans suffer from some form of tinnitus, and 12 million suffer severely enough to seek a physician's help. Surprisingly, most tinnitus sufferers admit they never heard of the condition until they got it. Causes of tinnitus include head and neck injuries and high doses of certain medications.
Damage caused by noise exposure is accumulative.
The tragedy is that the damage is irreversible. Unfortunately, many of us fail to take auditory damage seriously because we assume that excessive exposure to noise will result in nothing more than a little hearing loss in our senior years. Nothing could be further from the truth. While hearing loss is a common result of exposure to loud sound, tinnitus frequently goes hand in hand with injured hearing. There is no cure for tinnitus.