There are many types of hearing aids used to restore sound sensation to patients with hearing loss. Commonly, they are worn in the user’s ear or behind it with a conducting tube to deliver amplified external sound.

The restoration of hearing via hearing aids has also been discovered to alleviate tinnitus symptom. There is evidence that using hearing aids reduces awareness of tinnitus and improves the annoying masking of sounds and voices by internal tinnitus.

The mechanism of suppression is unclear but it has been suggested that restoring auditory input to the auditory nervous system, can reverse abnormal neuronal activity associated with tinnitus [[i]].

A study, using 25 years of data collected from patients attending a single tinnitus clinic, were conducted to investigate the role hearing aids can have in tinnitus modulation. A total of 1440 patients were given hearing aids, of which approximately 68% reported some improvement in tinnitus. Tinnitus suppression was not dependent on whether the hearing aid was fitted in one or both ears. In addition, digital hearing aids were discovered to be more effective in improving tinnitus perception when compared to older analogue types [[ii]].    

Other reports suggest that the best results are obtained when hearing aids are fitted to both ears, with the widest amplification setting and disabled noise controls [[iii]].